A simple guide to using Hubpages as an Adsense testing ground

This hub has been designed with the intention of showing fellow writers the power that Hubpages holds as a testing ground for keywords. In general gathering information about keywords is a long process which usually involves working with a paid keyword tracking service in order to evaluate the volume of traffic and competition that one will face when writing about and a certain set of keywords.

To make that a little clearer, if I am writing a hub about electric toothbrushes then the main keywords that I will be competing for in search engines will be "electric toothbrush" and "electric toothbrushes". This means that in order for my hub to be ranked first place on a search, it must be more relevant and have more solid backlinks for the specific keywords than any other site currently on the search results.

Using hubpages to test the competition and profitability of keywords can be using the steps below.

1 Once you have thought about the keyword/keywords you would like to test make sure that advertisers are willing to pay more than a few cents per click for it, you can do this by using Google's Traffic estimator, simply type the keyword/keywords you are wishing to test into the top box, select all countries as your target audience then click the continue button. The results that come up will tell you the average cost per click that you would expect to pay as an advertiser to keep your ad in the top Three ads displayed, but of course we are not advertisers we are publishers so a rough guide is to take the figure given here and divide it by ten, that's the revenue per click that you would expect. Once you have determined that the CPC is what you are after the next thing to check is the estimated clicks per day. Generally the higher this figure the higher the competition will be for that particular keyword/keywords, for this reason try to stick to keyword/keywords with low estimated traffic.

2 Use Google's Keywords tool to find synonyms of your keyword/keywords, these will be useful if your keyword/keywords turn out to be too broad and you end up needing to refine your keyword/keywords later on down the track. For example should my keywords "electric toothbrush" turn out to be too broad I could always refine my article to be about "Braun electric toothbrush" as suggested by the tool.

3 Once you have found the keyword/keywords that you intend to target it's time to write an article on that topic, there isn't much advice that I can offer on this aspect, except to make sure that your keyword/keywords is in the title and that it appears in the article itself a few times.

4 Now that the article is up and running you want to make sure that Google knows all about it, submit your hub to digg or stumble or one of those places and then check Google to make sure that it appears in the search results, to do this search hubpages and your keyword/keywords.

5 OK so you've researched your keyword/keywords and put up your hub, now is time to see how easily the Google search rankings can be manipulated by backlinking. Go to Google and search your keyword/keywords then look through the search results until you find where your hub ranks, take this placing down as a baseline and then start creating backlinks to your hub through forums or social bookmarking or however you crazy kids are doing it these days.

6 Recheck the results of your keyword/keywords search on Google again after a few days and see how much you have managed to move your ranking with the little backlinking that you have done. If the movement was substantial i.e. your ranking is less than half of what it was then this may be a good keyword/keywords to work with and you should move on to step 7, if not it is likely that you are looking at a highly competitive keyword/keywords and you might do well to try your luck with one of the synonyms from step 2 or to start again with a new keyword/keywords.

7 Now that you've got a good keyword/keywords your goal has to be to get it to the first page of Google to see if it gets any traffic and whether it makes any revenue. Do this by continuing with your building of backlinks, to see other ways of backlink building have a bit of a search around hubpages, this reply by Misha names a few that you could look at.

8 Now you should have all the information that you need to make an informed decision as to whether or not your keyword/keywords will work in a real life setting and so you can go forth and create a website about the said keyword/keywords. If you are still dubious about the keyword/keywords you are working with you can always setup a Wordpress free site and test it for an extended period.

That's it, that's all you need to test your keyword/keyword/keywordss for suitability. I must add that you should only really test keyword/keyword/keywords that you have some subject knowledge about otherwise your article will be dull and strung out and generally make the internet a worse place to be.

Feel free to ask any questions below.