Hubpages Traffic - Use of Tags to Drive Google Traffic
79What are Tags?
Originally tags were a way to group links to blog postings (or in the case of Hubpages hubs) that are topically related. Many folks have come to the conclusion that adding a lot of tags can help your search engine traffic, so are suggesting adding a ton of tags.
But, tags aren't magic for traffic for your Hubpages. There's a reason they work well. Here's a few observations on some pros and cons on tags for Hubpages. Most of this works for blogs like Wordpress as well, as the process of creating tags works in a similar way there.
How Many Tags Do You Typically Have On a Hub?
How Many Tags Do You Shoot For?
See results without votingRanking Well in the Google SERPs
First, lets take a look at the keys for generating good rankings on Google. Here is the grossly oversimplified version of success in Google rankings. This isn't a course on ranking, but just enough information to understand why tags are important. What we don't cover here is the choice of keywords. It's obvious that if you choose to optimize for a keyword that no one is searching for, then it really doesn't matter how well you are optimized.
On page factors (things that you can do on the hub itself) - The title field is far and away the biggest factor. Heading fields are a distant second, and the density of the keywords you want to rank for is another small factor (years ago this was the major factor, which is why keyword stuffing used to be so popular)
Off page factors (things you do with the linking to the hub) - Considered by some to be 80% of a pages ability to rank, it comes down to links, basically the number of links and the anchor text in those links. It's important to note that the links can come from the same site as the page being linked to, such as Hubpages. The Page Rank of a site is Google's estimate of the importance of a site, and is a weighting factor in how much a link is worth to the receiving page. The most important thing you can do for any page to rank is to get lots of links with the anchor text that includes the terms you want to rank for.
Generally, pages with more backlinks will rank better than pages with fewer backlinks. And the anchor text will help determine what the pages ranks for (the anchor text is the words typically in blue that are the text associated with the link to the page.)
Since in Hubpages the title of the hub is used both as the title (of the hub) and as the anchor text for all the automatically generated links, you can see that choosing the keyword carefully for your title will have a huge impact on the terms a hub will rank for.
 | Amazon Price: $13.46 List Price: $17.95 |
 | Amazon Price: $2.99 |
 | Amazon Price: $16.34 List Price: $29.99 |
 | Amazon Price: $4.95 |
What Does Adding Tags Do?
First - the obvious, it adds the text of the tag to your Hub. But while that can help, it is secondary to the other things that go on when you add tags.
Tag Pages - More importantly, tags are simply links to pages that are created with the tag as the header or title of the page. Click through to the tags on your hubs and you will find that you are on another page that lists all the hubs that have that tag on them. But, (and this is a big but) on Hubpages the tag pages only have 10 hubs listed on them (with links back to that hub). SOOO, if 10 or fewer hubs have that tag on them then you have a link back to your Hub from that tag page. Your hub now has a backlink, or some more Google love.
So, you have the possibility for every tag you add to get a backlink to your hub. That's the good news. So, why not add hundreds of tags? It turns out that there's limit to how effective this can be (not to mention that hubpages limits the number of tags, but as usual they are protecting you from doing something stupid.)
On one hand you could have a very popular tag. A tag like "how to" has almost 20000 hubs under it. But, for reasons related to how they manage the links, only about the top 10 to 40 "hot" hubs are on tag pages that will stick in the Google index and have any Page Rank. So, if you aren't in the top 20, you won't get much from it. Being on the 31st page of "how to" hubs does almost nothing for your rankings.
On the flip side, a tag like "dj+comet+01-46" only has 1 hub on it as of this writing. That tag page will likely not stay indexed and will have little Page Rank to link back to your hub. Overall, you're better off finding tags that have at least 3 or 4 hubs linking to them.
If you had dozens of tag links on your hub, the Page Rank that gets distributed to each one will be so diluted that you would have no hope of getting those tag pages to get and stay indexed with Google. And if you are writing a hub to get some link juice to an external page then adding dozens of links diluted the Page Rank that you are going to pass to the external link. So adding a huge number of tags will be self defeating as well.
Overall, you're better off finding tags that have at least 3 or 4 hubs linking to them, 10 to 20 is probably the sweet spot.
How Many Tags Should I Add to a Hub?
So, is adding a bunch of tags to your hub a good way to improve traffic to your hub? The answer is probably. Like anything, it depends on the competition and the number of similar hubs, and whether your goal is to do linking to pages off site.
Adding more tags can generate internal backlinks to your hub, but adding too many dilutes the Page Rank of the site and may generate a bunch of tag pages that will not stick in the Google index and do no one any good. Choose tags that are a little popular to improve your odds of being on the first page, and add at least a dozen or so. Hubpages limits the number of tags that you can add, apparently based in part on the length of the hub, so they've made it difficult to add too many.Finally, for those of you with Wordpress blogs, it turns out this can be even more powerful on Wordpress as it can be used to create related article links right on the page, but that's a Hub for another day.
One other potential benefit are the links from related hubs. While Hubpages doesn't really disclose how they choose which hubs link to which other hubs on the related hubs section, it seems they use some combination of the hub category and the hub tags to choose related hubs, with a bias towards a few of your own hubs if appropriate. Another source of related links!
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I'm struggling to get all this, but thanks for the info. Sandra Busby
I'm bookmarking your hub and will give it a re-read after I go and look at my tags. Thanks - useful.
Useful and interesting hub here. This one really helps.
I'm happy for all information on this topic. Thanks for a great article.
Useful hub. I haven't understood tags properly until now. Working on optimisation of my hubs and this has come in handy.
I think you have just broken through the iron curtain of my un-computer-internet-linky-dealie densness. Now I'm going to print your article out so I can look at it the old-fashioned way (in other words, on paper and not on a TV). I'm a fan :)
An excellent and truly informative hub. Thanks for writing it.
Thanks for writing a very useful hub. I think I've been putting too many tags in my hubs so will go back and check them over.
What a great hub, and full of helpful information. Thank you for sharing your insight. Time to revisit my hubs and tweak my tags!
I read this hub hopiing to get a better understanding of tags and not only did you explain it very well, you gave me more useful information about backlinking. Tiny pieces of all this information are coming together and starting to make sense to me. Thank you!
Hi John, and thankyou!
This is excellent information that is very well presented. I am wondering what your thoughts are on HubScore and tags.. Will adding too many tags also lower a hubscore?
Thank you for sharing this information.
Cool. Thanks
Thanks you. This is very helpful to me.
This is the best description of how tags work that I have read. Thank you for an easy to understand explanation of how they work and how to use them.
Great Hub, thanks for sharing. I would have to say though, that if you're trying to sell products on your site, the more relevant tags you have, the better. They'll bring in a variety of people that are looking to buy what you're selling :)
Good guide on how to use tags effectively for getting google traffic. Thanks.
This is very useful information. Thanks for sharing.
As always you provide a wealth of info, now I just need to understand it all, lol. But seriously thanks for the insigth it at least gave me a good idea of what tags are and places me on the next journey of understanding them better.
Thank you for a clear and concise explanation on this topic.
Nice article with detailed information.
a fab article to read - thank you :)
wonderul article on tags as I was struggling. Thanks
I found some value in this as I heard building backlinks to hubpage is a no-no, maybe it is too many they are worried about. Thanks for writing this.
Very helpful! Definitely improved my knowledge of hubpages and tagging.
Some very insightful info, this stuff is gold!
Yes I am new Hubber and after reading your post I think it will really help me
I was struggling with the tags for hubs, but thanks this has been pretty useful.
Thanks for the great Hub. I will be tweeting this Hub article. It is a great day when you learn something and I just had a great day.
This is very useful information, I will be sure to implement it within my next hub!
Thanks for a great Hub. I am going to bookmark this and send it to everyone who asks me about SEO and the use of tags.
AJ
Great hub, I learned a lot from it and will be back.Thanks
Thanks so much for this hub! I was so confused about tags and was definitely doing it wrong. :P Your article helped out a lot!
i didnt really understand the finer points of tagging until i read this article. thanks for the info!
An excellent explanation of how we can use tags to help benefit our pages. Thanks for such an illuminating article.
Great info for a beginner like me. It was very easy to understand. Thank you for sharing!
Another piece of the puzzle. Thanks for the info.
very nice hub. I voted up.
Thanks for the info on tags!
A great lesson on tags on hubs. Good information since I'm a new hubber. Thanks for sharing as I need all the help I can get.
Great hub, very informative! Going to take a look at my tags!
Nice job on this hub (and feel free to delete this comment), but I do take issue with one thing you said. You say, "...the title of the hub is used both as the title of the hub and as the anchor text for all the automatically generated links..." That's not correct. I almost always have a title that is different from my URL. HubPages does give you the ability to have different titles and URLs. I don't believe it's the title you are speaking of, but rather the URL. Or am I missing something?
Great hub thanks for your input
Nice one, thanks. Spent most of the day looking for this info, stopped looking and found it minutes later.
This was *EXTREMELY* helpful. Thank you very much!
I have a question - I just added some new tags to one of my pages, and checked the pages related to those tags. They each have about 4-5 hubs but mine is not one of them. Does it just take awhile to update after I add a tag?
Thanks!
Nice work on this! I think a lot of people ignore tags, but as you point out they can actually be an important piece of the puzzle.
Didn't knew about Tags in that kind of detail. Thanks.
Informative and interesting hub. Thanks johnr54.
thank you for making this clearer to me, I have been pretty ignorant as to how they work but will now go back over all of my hubs . . Happy days D
I don' t realize that tags are so useful. great hub.
Great info. Thanks
An interesting and useful hub.
Thanks for a great hub, lots of very useful information.
thanks for the tips!! I will def do some revising
Tags are why I update and rectify my Hubs - and yours really hit home! It's definitely a bookmark.
voted up & useful! very good hub, well written informative and concise...
Great advice on tags. I'm a newbie here and I find this really informative. Thanks for sharing!
Before I don't focus too much on using tags, now I am more careful with tags that I use. Thanks for the info.
I'm just a beginner, John, and this really cleared out my confusion about tags and their use. Thanks so much!
Thanks! I have to admit I haven't had any coherent tagging strategy so far, so this is a big help to me in getting one figured out.
Great ideas if your tags actually work! You are buggered if they dont.
Check out my hub here and see how many tags dont work - most of them.
Great information here. Thanks.
Thanks for a very useful article on tagging - something I need to learn more about!
Love and peace
Tony
Thanks for an excellent hub on tags. It really helped me understand tagging a lot better. Much appreciated.
This hub is certainly going to deserve a bookmark and a re-read. Thanks for the next step in my understanding. Small steps. Taken one at a time. I am looking through my tags right now.
This is amazing. you actually coverd everything on how to get traffic. your information on tagging was spot on my friend. keep up the good work and help the community.. good luck.
I enjoyed this detailed and down-to-earth explanation of tags. Thanks for putting it all down so clearly.
Great info, I've been looking for this...
Thanks
Hey JohnR54, GREAT Hub on tags and how to properly use them, what they do, and how they can seriously affect how Google sees the Hub. Thanks for your expertise and advice! I'm going to look at my tags now... :-)
Here's a link to my Hub on SEO for doctors - http://hubpages.com/hub/Top-5-Cosmetic-Surgery-Mar
You learn something every day...
I had no idea that Google won't hold an index for a tag with few hubs linked to it. To be honest, I didn't know that tags had so much to them. I used to view them as old style meta keywords.
Thanks for the information.
I'm back to this great hub of yours again John :) I'm having some issues with tags that I wonder if you have any advice on? Why aren't tag pages being created for many of my tags and why aren't I on the tag pages I want to be on? Is it better to have fewer tags, rather than going for the maximum allowed? I keep experimenting with tags but I'm still having problems, so I'd be grateful for any advice.
Great hub. Very well done.
While I knew tags were important for SEO purposes you go into a lot of details I never considered before. Bookmarked so I can return to this later as needed.
I found this informative, I still have lots to learn even though I have been writing hubs for seven months. Now I understand the basics, hubs like this are important to learn how to improve how I write here. Thank you.
Agree with your inputs :)
Thanks for that very useful information
Still learning how to use stuff on HUB Pages so this was a very interesting read for me
I will go back and look at my hubs, and check my tags again.
My traffic pretty much sucks. I need to do something different. I'm not getting anywhere so far.
Great information. Thanks
Nice useful hub, thank you!
Johnr
tag your it.
nicely done
It is a shame that this hub didn't get hundreds of page views.
Excellent info. Found this hub via a link by Ryan Kett found on another hub.
Now I have some sort of plan to work with instead of just chucking out words here and there and hoping for the best.
I didn't even realise that a new page was created from tags so thanks for the education.
Have bookmarked and rated this up.
I feel like I am in a foreign land so I am researching so much of this technical stuff so I can get back to the reason why I came here, which is to write! I know, silly me! Anyway, I have to say that I think I got about half of what you are saying here (which is way more than anything I have understood thus far) and I didn't sob for 20 minutes after reading it! Thanks and good job! If you can teach me something, you got it goin' on!
You don't have to believe me. They aren't just meta tags.
Try clicking on one of the tags on this hub, and you will find a page (or pages) that lists all the hubs that have been tagged with that tag. Not only do the search engines crawl them, but if you click on one like "hubpages" you will see that it has a Page Rank of 4, not a bad page to have a link from.
I thought tags were only meta tags used in the head of the HTML code for the Search Engines. Are you saying those tags are internal to HubPages also. I thought the categorization when you started a hub is what made it accessible to other Hubbers. Arn't tags(meta) made for the SE crawlers only!
Hi John, thankyou for sharing your knowledge on this :) I've been tagging all wrong.....for 7 months, lol! Now I understand it - eureka! I'm goin gback to edit my tags now.
Thanks again,
Susana :)
Useful Hub. Thank You.
This has been a very informative and helpful hub. I now have a better understanding of tags and how they work. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Well done, you answered my number 1 question about tags which was, how many is too many! I agree with you although I'm new to this, it seems like 10-20 is the best amount.
Good information here John, thanks for pointing me here.
Very informative and helpful hub. Thank you.
Hi,
I have got some extra point from this hub. I would like to change my tags in my hubs.
Thanks,
Jyoti Kothari
Excellent hub - Thanks for sharing this incredible hub with us.
Thanks, info really helped. Hopefully i will get increased traffic.
Great info, thanks!
Thanks for the advice. I'm now inspired to start experimenting with different tagging tactics. Good to know that picking tags doesn't always have to be a complete shot in the dark.
I'm glad that some folks find this stuff useful. Good luck with boosting your traffic!
Hi johnr54, I was pointed in the direction of this hub by Marissa Wright. Can I just thank you sincerely for your willingness to educate us others. I have begun working through my 78 hubs, redoing my tags, and have already seen:- a)improving hubscores, b)increasing traffic, and c) increased CTR.
I suggest that anybody reading this takes the whole article word for word and implements changes, if you follow Johns advise closely then you will see improvements in your performance.
Hi,
You have enhanced my knowledge and thanks for the same.
Thumbs up!
Thanks,
Jyoti Kothari
Thanks, John, for such an interesting and informative hub. This will be very helpful to me
Very well explained for those of us who are still unsure about tags.
Thanks for the insight. I have been using tags similar to how to describe without really thinking about it. I might have to go and reconsider a few though.
Great hub, John. I thought I knew all there was to know about tags, and boy was I wrong! :)
Thank you for explaining how the tags work or don't work for traffic.
John - excellent advice. I found this really helpful and logical - well done!
yes, this is helpful-- the number of tags I post is not static. More, often, for longer hubs,
Interesting Hub and great info Johr54. Am off to look at my tags!
Sarju 4 weeks ago
Very useful hubs