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How to Turn Your Content Hub Into an SEO Powerhouse

seo content hub

Our Content Hub’s monthly organic traffic grew 4x over the last year. Part of that success is attributed to the content we create, but another part comes from our constant effort to optimize our Hub's content for search engines. In other words, our search engine optimization (SEO) is working!

Uberflip gives you the tools you need to improve on-page SEO. In this article, I offer up a few SEO tips on how to grow your Hub’s traffic and generate more leads in the process.

Hubs management SEO

There are several fields at your disposal on the Hubs management screen. These fields allow you to greet your visitors and explain what your content is about, they will also tell search engines how to display your content on the SERP (search engine results page).

description

The “Introduction” field found under the “Appearance” tab of the Hubs management screen will act as the "H2" tag of your Hub. In other words, it is the subtitle of your Hub and the first element that appears on your homepage. When crafting your introduction use important keywords that you would like search engines to rank.

The “Full Description” can be found right below the "Introduction" on the homepage of your Hub and will also act as the meta description that will appear in search results. Treat the description field like ad copy that captures attention and clicks - ours ends with “Want your own Hub? Try it free!” as a call to action. Search engines care about the click-through rate on the SERP and if you can make people click, this may improve your ranking.

There are a few more ways to achieve strong SEO using tools found throughout your Hub. For example, completing the description on a new "Stream" works exactly like the “Full Description” on your homepage, but only for that stream. Are you using Marketing Streams to target different personas or industries? Write a unique description that will appeal to those personas/industries when they see it on Google.

When customizing your Hub’s menu, it’s important to carefully choose which streams are going to be listed in it and what anchor text is going to link to them. Every single page of your Hub is going to link to those streams so make sure that they are deserving of all this love. When crafting your menu, try to use as many keywords as possible rather than simply referring to your streams as their content format. For example, it’s better to link to your video stream as “[Insert industry name or topic] videos” rather than just “Videos."

And last but not least, don't forget to customize the footer of your Hub. While at this point links in the footer don’t have much impact on SEO it is still worth your time to link to an important page of your site or Hub than to leave it blank. You might want to use your brand name and/or main keywords in there as they will appear on every single page of your Hub.

In-content SEO

Now that we've covered off how the Hub is set up to help your SEO, let's look at how you can help yourself.

Within your content, all the best practices of on-page SEO apply:

  1. Provide unique content or a unique take on a certain topic
  2. Include the subject of your content in the title and several times in the piece
  3. Don’t forget to add an alt text attribute to your images
  4. Link to relevant internal and external resources

Speaking of links, we take care of all the basics such as linking to the parent category (content stream) and your homepage. I would also advise you to use these  three  types of links in each of your blog posts for a healthy mix:

  1. Internal links to related pieces of content
  2. External links to your main site if your Hub lives as a subdomain
  3. External links to authoritative websites in your industry

For your embedded pieces of content, such as SlideShare decks and YouTube videos, we will import the media description as the body of the post. If you did not write a description on those sites, it is imperative to edit the post on your Hub to add a few sentences. It will help search engines (and humans!) understand what the content is about.

Content curation SEO

It’s important to keep in mind that content curation is a powerful weapon but it should not be abused. Search engines won’t be impressed if you decide to curate the whole Internet on your Hub. Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, try to curate only the best content and keep a healthy balance between curated versus original content.

Twitter lists are a good way to curate content and drive organic traffic. For example, we have a stream called "Tweets We Love" consisting of tweets that we think are great examples of marketing. These tweets are indexed in search engines and bring a decent amount of traffic to our Hub. All external links are set to “Nofollow” so you don’t have to worry about them much.

Advanced SEO options

We provide advanced options that give you greater control on how search engines handle each of your content streams. For example, if you want to pull a Twitter list in your Hub but are unsure if the keyword mix in these tweets is right for your SEO, you can easily check the ”No Robots Meta Tag” option for that stream so search engines won’t index it.

If your blog also lives somewhere other than your Hub, you can enable the “Canonical Meta Tag” that will tell search engines the original content source. This will prevent you from being penalized for duplicate content.

meta tags

To get a complete overview of your content keywords and links, simply connect your Uberflip account with Google Webmasters Tools from the “Integrations” tab or try a more advanced solution like Moz.

Conclusion

We've engineered Hubs to drive organic traffic to your content, but it’s still worth your time to boost your Hub's search engine optimization following these easy tips. 

About the Author

Francois Mathieu is a Marketing Consultant and Entrepreneur based in Toronto, Canada. He is the Co-Founder of <a href="https://hojicha.co/">Hōjicha Co.</a>, a specialty tea distributor and retailer.

Profile Photo of Francois Mathieu