We're always measuring the effectiveness of different online tools for increasing the visibility of our clients' professional reputations online. Two domains that frequently show up in the back link profiles of several law firm websites are Squidoo and HubPages. But do these two sites actually have a place in your law firm seo campaign?
Squidoo is a publishing platform that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages that collect information on a topic of interest.
Not sure what you can make a lens about? You could make a lens about your law practice. Or a lens on a particular legal topic. Or a lens about your legal blog, to increase its visibility.
The idea is that you are contributing to the Squidoo community in hopes that the community will reward your contribution through increased traffic and links.
Like Squidoo, HubPages is an online publishing platform for originally-written and topical content. HubPages also includes a built architecture for monetizing traffic to your HubPages. In terms of using hubs for search engine optimization, HubPages has an algorithm for calculating your hub score. Only hubs with scores over 75 will pass "link juice" back to the sites to which they are linking.
As I stated at the beginning, we have seen these two domains appear in many law firm websites for which we have performed competitive analysis. In other words, there are many seo firms out there using these domains for their law firm seo clients.
However, while some have used these tools successfully, others are simply spamming the communities.
In order to make these platforms work for your law firm website, you have to focus on the quality of the content you are adding. If you merely advertise your legal services, these tools will provide nothing more than a little domain diversity in your back link profile. In fact, if you spam HubPages, the only back links to your site will contain "nofollows".
So, make sure that, if you are going to include these content platforms as part of your search engine optimization campaign, you use them properly.