To kick this off, what is a hub page (hint - it isn't just a popular blogging site)? Hub pages are a central area, a page, from which other pages link to and from. Sounds like a homepage? Well, it is very similar except that a hub page is intended for a single topic on your website.
Let's say you were trying to rank for a certain phrase, you would create a hub page specifically for that phrase and then link other related pages to it. Links would need to be both ways, so you would link from the hub to the related page and back again from the related page to the hub.
This essentially tells Google, and others, that the hub page is 'important' and therefore will attribute more authourity to it than it would the individual pages. As you are probably aware, internal link building is very important for an effective SEO campaign, and link building using hub pages is a great way of doing this.
There is a lot of information out there about this strategy, so I won't go into too much detail here, but you should certainly take a look at this article on the subject of hub pages by Tim Holt.
Hub pages and Google Plus
Social hub pages on Google Plus should work just as well with other social networks, but for the purposes of this article we will focus on Google Plus. In case you didn't realise it, every post created on Google Plus is actually a web page and is treated by search engines as such. Of course, Google make more use of these than other search engines do (namely delivering search results based on those in your 'circles', as well as more organic results) but they are taken into consideration nonetheless.
With that in mind, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that a post on Google Plus can be optimised in the same way that any other web page can - and this includes hub pages.
Traditionally, hub pages have always been in the same location as the rest of your content (in other words, right there on your website) but with social media increasingly being used as marketing tools then why not create hub pages there too?
Understand that this is, as far as I'm concerned, just theory - but I see absolutely no reason why it shouldn't work; and it certainly cannot hurt, can it? Of course not.
It comes to mind that there are two ways to approach this, and both are outlined below. Whichever you choose (if you choose to use one, and bravo if you do), it is still a good idea to create 'on-site' hub pages too - social hub pages should be used as a part of wider social marketing strategies, and shouldn't be seen as a replacement for anything else.
- Google Plus hub page for your website
The first, most obvious, method is pretty much the same as your on-site hub page except you can link some of your Google Plus posts here too (edit the posts, also, to include links back).
- Hub page for your Google Plus marketing strategy
With this method, your Google Plus page is your focus and not necessarily your website. Create a post that is focused on a particular theme, just like you would any other hub page, and edit previous posts to link back to it. Any new posts, relevant to that central theme, should also include a link back to that hub post.
Of course, posts linked to should be included in the hub post too because internal linking is a two way street.
The great thing about creating hub posts, especially in Google Plus, is that they can be shared directly with huge audiences - traffic in a can! Google Plus is rife with vibrant communities (you can learn more about communities on this post) and a single hub post can be shared with as many relevant communities as you like.
When sharing to more than one community it is always a good idea to edit your settings so that community posts do not appear on your stream - otherwise these posts will look very spammy, and you are likely to put people off.
In case that put you off, it shouldn't - multiple sharing to communities is NOT spam (but it can look it to human eyes, hence the need to eliminate it from your stream) and you will NOT be penalised. You can learn more about blog syndication here.
Creating centralised areas for your content is always a good idea, otherwise your pages and posts are just being scattered throught the ether with little, if anything, to connect them all together and back to your website.
Imagine your website, or your social strategy, as a hardcopy book. If all of the pages are scattered across the city, with no real way of knowing if each page is from the same book (assuming you are patient enough to track them all down), are you going to make the effort of colllating them for other reader? Probably not, and search engines won't do it for your website either.
If your book is, on the other hand, already collated and indexed and bound to a nice shiny table of contents then you are more likely to read, and recommend (if it's any good) that book. Search engines look at your website in exactly the same way.
Try it yourself, and let me and others know if it worked for you or if there is anything that you would add to it. Social hub pages - are they worth the effort?