Targeting Keywords at Home page or 301 URL?
-
Background info
This is a new site and I am using Wordpress for a CMS not a blog and I have set a static page as the home page.
The problem is when I configure the home page as a static page in wordpress it sets a 301 redirect to that page, which is this domain.com/software-consultancy (so the software-consultancy page is now domain.com).
I thought about creating a separate Home page but I didn't see the point as the pages would be almost identical.
**"Should I target keywords to the home page?" **
If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ?
My thoughts are that if the URL has the keywords I am targeting in it will help with SEO.
Or should I create a separate home page and just link the company name back to the home and have a separate page for "software consultancy" my thought is that having exactly what the company does on the home page would be better. But I don't want to lose out on search engine traffic by not having the keywords in the URL I am going to be link building for.
I guess if I link build to the 301 redirect URL I can always revert back to this URL if I want to change?
FYI here is my site structure:
The site is for a small software consultancy and I have the following structure:
domain.com/software-consultancy -- (Set as Wordpress static Page so essentially a 301 redirect to / )
domain.com/software-consultancy/areas
domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/london
domain.com/software-consultancy/areas/new-york
I would really appreciate some feedback on this, even if it's experience / advice and there is no exact answer.
Many Thanks,
J
-
I don't think area sub nav is that prohibitive, especially with listing 8 cities.
-
Hi Robert,
Thanks for your response
Let me clarify the 301 redirect, the home page is now set as the software-consultancy page and it looks like this in the browser domain.com for example. If you visit the software-consultancy page it 301's to the home page. Also all sub pages of software-consultancy/ still function as normal.
So essentially wordpress is just marking the home page as the software-consultancy page.
I am going to list around 8 areas / cities for the location part, I would lose the areas but it makes the drop down navs cleaner on the site. If I change this though I will deffintly lose the area sub dir. I guess having the areas sub nav is not going to make a massive amount of difference SEO wise?
Thanks Again
J
-
So, Domain.com redirects permanently to Domain.com/software-consultancy? If so, then directing links to either will give essentially the same value as the majority (90% +) of the juice flows through on a 301. You have a small software consultancy so the fact that Domain.com/software-consultancy is homepage is in no way a negative. (Visitors are not looking for off the shelf software and landing on consultancy.)
_If I start link building using the phrase "software consultancy" to the home page should I link to domain.com or the 301 redirect URL domain.com/software-consultancy ? _
Even though the 301 sends most of the juice I would still go to actual homepage. No need to give up 1 to 10% even.
I think based on you putting "company name" in you clarified for me a bit more of what you are asking which is "should I make an effort to have Brand {company name} have more status?" Well, based on current thinking, unless you have a well known brand, having it in the url/title tag won't help as no one is searching on it. You want to get out what they are searching on. They know they need to look for a software consultant, they don't yet know it is you.
But, one bit of advice on your structure: If area is really not something that needs to have its own page with sub headings (subdirectories) afterward, flatten it by pulling out the areas: domain.com/software-consultancy/London, New-York, etc. That would allow you later to still add specifics to London or New York if services are different for each, etc. I do not see where having Areas helps. For someone searching your site, unless you have a lot more categories or are going to list 8 -10 cities, you can get away with just listing the cities.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
How to get a large number of urls out of Google's Index when there are no pages to noindex tag?
Hi, I'm working with a site that has created a large group of urls (150,000) that have crept into Google's index. If these urls actually existed as pages, which they don't, I'd just noindex tag them and over time the number would drift down. The thing is, they created them through a complicated internal linking arrangement that adds affiliate code to the links and forwards them to the affiliate. GoogleBot would crawl a link that looks like it's to the client's same domain and wind up on Amazon or somewhere else with some affiiiate code. GoogleBot would then grab the original link on the clients domain and index it... even though the page served is on Amazon or somewhere else. Ergo, I don't have a page to noindex tag. I have to get this 150K block of cruft out of Google's index, but without actual pages to noindex tag, it's a bit of a puzzler. Any ideas? Thanks! Best... Michael P.S., All 150K urls seem to share the same url pattern... exmpledomain.com/item/... so /item/ is common to all of them, if that helps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
If Robots.txt have blocked an Image (Image URL) but the other page which can be indexed has this image, how is the image treated?
Hi MOZers, This probably is a dumb question but I have a case where the robots.tags has an image url blocked but this image is used on a page (lets call it Page A) which can be indexed. If the image on Page A has an Alt tags, then how is this information digested by crawlers? A) would Google totally ignore the image and the ALT tags information? OR B) Google would consider the ALT tags information? I am asking this because all the images on the website are blocked by robots.txt at the moment but I would really like website crawlers to crawl the alt tags information. Chances are that I will ask the webmaster to allow indexing of images too but I would like to understand what's happening currently. Looking forward to all your responses 🙂 Malika
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Malika11 -
Dfferent url of some other site is shown by Google in cace copy of our site's page
Hi, When i check cached copy of url of my site http://goo.gl/BZw2Zz , the url in cache copy shown by Google is of some other third party site. Why is Google showing third party url in our site's cached url. Did any of you guys faced any such issue. Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vivekrathore0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Home Page Link Juice Dilution
I have worked to build out a keyword targeted library of over 700 Guides of approx. 800 word each. They are specifically targeted at actionable verticals and contain 3x strategically placed CTAs in each article. So far, I have only managed to get a low level of uniques per day to this section of the website. This website's external backlinks are largely pointed at the home page. Furthermore, the home page has a footer link to 10,000 SEO crawl-able user generated profiles. These profiles have little potential for conversion and offer little value. Given the above information, I was hoping that someone could help me with the following questions: Is it possible that home page link juice is becoming diluted as result 10,000 user profiles being live on the site? If so, can a "no follow" on the home page footer link to the user profiles prevent the juice from transferring? Overall, I would like to redirect this PR5 domain's link juice to these guides where they will have a much higher conversion rate.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TQContent0 -
Do I need to use canonical tags if I'm 301 redirecting pages?
I just took a job about three months and one of the first things I wanted to do was restructure the site. The current structure is solution based but I am moving it toward a product focus. The problem I'm having is the CMS I'm using isn't the greatest (and yes I've brought this up to my CMS provider). It creates multiple URL's for the same page. For example, these two urls are the same page: (note: these aren't the actual urls, I just made them up for demonstration purposes) http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Omnipress
http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/bossman.cmsx (I know this is terrible, and once our contract is up we'll be looking at a different provider) So clearly I need to set up canonical tags for the last two pages that look like this: With the new site restructure, do I need to put a canonical tag on the second page to tell the search engine that it's the same as the first, since I'll be changing the category it's in? For Example: http://www.website.com/home/meet-us/team-leaders/boss-man/ will become http://www.website.com/home/MEET-OUR-TEAM/team-leaders/boss-man My overall question is, do I need to spend the time to run through our entire site and do canonical tags AND 301 redirects to the new page, or can I just simply redirect both of them to the new page? I hope this makes sense. Your help is greatly appreciated!!0 -
301 redirect every pages?
Good evening, my question might sound stupid but please forgive me, I am still learning SEO. If I build a new site that will replace an existing site. Is there any point to do a 301 redirect for pages that had no inbound link so, no juice to pass? I kind of think that it would be a better practice to 301 redirect each pages to a page that make sense on the new web site .... but here is why I think that. Why I say that If I am lucky, many of my old web site pages will be indexed, many of them having no inbound links. So once the new web site online, until all my new web sites pages are indexed, I could imagine Google would send people to the index pages (the old ones that do not exist anymore)... I am right? So in that case, if I do a 301 redirect only for pages that have inbound links, the user would end up on a 404 page. Could you tell me if it make sense how I think? Thanks a lot !! Nancy P.S. I would not redirect if it make no sense to the user. I fully understand that we must always keep the user experience in mind in any 404 and 301 redirect decisions. But to simplify the question, just suppose it is ok from a user perspective to map every old site pages to a page in new web site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EnigmaSolution0