Which page to rank for a Keyword? Home Page or Deep Page?
-
So, we have a situation where there is one particular keyword we want to rank for.
We have been up and down over the years, at our best probably position 4-5, and now at 20ish. Thats for our home page of course, which the majority of our linking is probably pointing at.
We also have a sub page which is optimised for that particular service.
The term is "web design brisbane".
So as you can imagine, Web Design is in itself a service and we offer others.Should we optimise our home page for it and remove the sub page?
Keep the sub page because its one our services and optimise both?
Do some kind of canonical thing?
Change our interlinking?All our competitors home pages seem to be the ones that rank, and it feels and looks better in results if its the home page, but if switching up to our sub page is better im all ears.
Also if our sub page is somehow hurting or leaking SEO from the home page, id like to know as well.
Would prefer to not have to provide a link, due to competition but if someone wants to know we can always PM.
-
In my opinion what you should really consider is that what page (either home or internal page is working well for you in terms of conversions...
If home page is offering you more conversions then probably you should go for it! And direct your SEO strategy to get results from home page but if the inner page is offering your better conversions then you should prefer redirecting the angle of your SEO strategy towards inner pages...
I think there is no need to delete any internal page for this! But all you need to do is to build some great links so that your rankings can get stable positions against your key phrases.
-
No, the content of the pages is very different, its just that our home page is what we want, but our services page actually has better content for that keyword, so it was a question of what to do.
I think ill optimise the home page as per moz.orgs tools and leave our sub page optimised and as is.
Thanks for the advice.
-
Cheers chris well get on this!
-
I'm not aware of much/any research showing that changing anchor text on external links is harmful. Keep in mind, too that you'd be eliminating most of them anyway. Again, I say, emphasize your brand, more so than the keywords. Diluting is good. Thematic is good, too.
I'd lean towards being aggressive in your changes time frame, as there's still a long way down to the bottom of the slope you're on and you don't want to wake up one morning and find yourself there.
-
There's no way that your example.com/services/web-design/ is actually harming your home page ranking. However if it was just example.com/web-design/ might be a better fit
Are you getting any duplicate content issues when you run it through the campaign mode here on Moz?
What is your current domain trust, rank could you case the numbers below and could you do that for your web design page as well?
Are you running a content management system?
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas,
So we have:
Main Page
/
Web Design page
/services/web-design/
We already have these pages, I am just worried that our:
/services/web-design/
is harming our home page ranking for that keyword, or at least that theres some room for improvement. -
If you need anyone to confirm what Chris has said here I agree 100% with what you stated. Google has become extremely tough on web design companies that put their URL with the exact same anchor text in the footer. It then ends up showing up on every single page that is made on the website and does not look good at all to Google as relevancy of the website pointing to matters quite a bit to them still rather not you have made it which I believe in someway makes you very relevant to that site however Google does not agree.
Thumbs up Chris good point to bring up and very important.
Definitely get rid of the extra URL made by example.com that is only going to hurt you.
You can use the methods Chris has stated as an example to also help with that.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Chris,
Yes unfortunately most of those are from a long time ago.
We are worried that changing them will raise a red flag because links on pages shouldnt really change if the rest of the content doesnt. In this case we would be making them "better" in googles eyes in that we would add our company and dilute the keyword phrases out a bit, but at the same time do you think theres any risk or danger in doing this.
Or should we change parts of the page as well? Or even do them a few at a time?
-
When you say so page are you talking about creating link that looks similar to this below and architecture
http://www.example.com/subpage/example/ ?
or
http://www.example.com/example/
or
Ideally the best way to build in my opinion is a flat system. Depending on how many pages you have
that would make
http://www.example.com/ this would be your homepage
http://www.example.com/web-design/ this would be your web design page
If you want to Interlake keywords I still recommend using scribecontent.com it is excellent for this type of thing.
Yours links on site architecture
http://moz.com/blog/site-architecture-for-seo
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2258433/Next-Generation-Site-Architecture
If you were willing to private message me your URL I would be happy to have a look at it as well.
Thanks,
Thomas
-
I'd stick with your home page as the result for that search. Remember, "Web design" is a service, "web design Brisbane" is keyword, not a service.
Looking at (what I figure is) your website and your back links, I see you doing what has gotten a lot of designers in trouble--putting tag lines with exact match anchor text in the footers of all the pages on their clients site . If I were you, I'd make a list of 20 different possible anchor texts that also include your actual brand name and go to every client site you're able to and either remove or nofollow all but one or two footer links on each site.The live links that remain should employ your list of varied anchor text. Moving forward from there, keep your new links thematic but diverse and emphasize your brand.
-
What Todd stated is true about trying to get a page to rank higher than your homepage. Well it is possible it is not really something very desirable by an end-user standpoint and it is very hard to do.
If I make a recommendation of a cool that you should use if you're targeting a secular keyword this can be used with WordPress is a plug-in, or any type of webpage at all. Via its own web-based system.
more
http://www.copyblogger.com/scribe-4/
If I can make another two suggestions. I highly recommend HubSpots information about how to target keywords
A very useful download is available here
http://offers.hubspot.com/blueprint?__hstc
Another excellent tool for finding ways you can make the improvements to your website is marketing grader I helps but it is 100% free and if you quite a bit of feedback about your websites current position.
I hope this is of help to you.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Todd, thanks for the great answer.
What should we do about the sub page? Its still one of our services. Are we jeopardizing our root url rankings for that keyword buy having another optimised sub page which we also link to from our navigation, and of which there will be some back links from the web to?
-
In general, high authority websites are able to rank inner pages better. If you have a smaller budget for content development, then you should consider focusing on the home page to rank for this phrase and other clustered (related) phrases.
Also, if the company itself is purely about web design primarily, then this is advisable. The only time I advise an inner page ranking is when the company offers this as a service, and has high authority / ability to build high authority relatively quickly, driving that inner page up to top 5 positions.
Otherwise, it is always more difficult, by nature, to rank an internal page over a homepage (root domain) for competitive terms such as yours.
Hope this helps!
~Todd
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
-
URL, page title, item name - which is most important for google ranking
We are a bridal store and are able to use different information in the URL, Page title and item name. In item name we give the product a name for us to identify ie. Alex Lace Dress in Black/Nude, Ivory/Nude, Red/Red In Page Title we use the suppliers name and product code as well as the item name ie. Jadore j8075 Alex Lace Dress Online Australia URL = alex-lace-dress/ Are we using the correct format ? What could we do to improve them?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Home Page SEO and city specific targeting?
From What I have read you should target one keyword for each page on your site with the exception of the home page. Is this correct? If the most searched keywords for a Dentist in the area are Dentist "city name"
On-Page Optimization | | scott315
Cosmetic Dentist "city name"
Family Dentist "city name" Should you try and add content on the home page with h1 tags of each of these? If so then what about the page title/url Also if you are targeting keyword Dentist "city name" but like 4 different cities, should you have a separate page for each of this cities and then if so would that not be duplicate content with the exception of city name? Thanks1 -
Should we consider redirecting a high ranking subdomain page to our homepage?
My site bluecotton.com sells custom printed t-shirts. Our DA is 46. Our homepage is PA 55. The design studio is where users create their designs. Over the years the design studio has received a lot of fan fair including links from gizmodo and adobe. When I rank against our biggest competitors customink, ooshirts, uberprints.com I find that our domain as a whole doesn't look all that great. However, when I look at the history of our subdomain I see that we are more trusted and credible than all of our competitors. We have 10k links pointing to the design studio. Here is my question. What if I did 301 redirect of bluecotton.com/studio.html to bluecotton.com? Then I created a new url for the DS. This would not cause users any problems. In fact for many they would get more context around what we are trying to do and what we offer. Is this crazy? I never find results in google for the design studio. It always shows our home. That is pretty much what happens to all of our competitors on the higher traffic terms that are driving real sales. So why do i ask? If my subdomain is more valuable becuase of the design studio links then I wonder if I redirected it to the homepage if it would supercharge my homepage and propel is forward in the serps. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | bradwayland0 -
Dynamic pages on a static html pages websiite
Good evening everybody. I am new on SeoMoz that I find very helpful in my work. I am not a web developer so please excuse me if my technical language is poor.I have an issue that maybe you can help me to solve. I work for a company who has a website, which is old and very well positioned on google for the most important keywords for the field of the company I work for (dentistry). It is a website made some years ago and it's made of static html pages.I would like to add a section in my website where I can post articles, like a blog (I think of a wordpress-style website) with daily posts (so with a dynamic page). Is there a way to do this without modifying the structure of the website and without losing pages, urls and ranking? We're on the first google page for many keywords of interests in our city and it would be a great damage for us to lose those positions.Thank you very much!
On-Page Optimization | | adec0 -
Using fathead page keywords for directories and as a red herring to competitors
I'm fairly new to SEO and I have been reading a lot on here and the SEOmoz guides over the last few days, finding it very interesting. I am wondering about page keywords, I read that the engines no longer use them. In this thread they say they still use them because of directories. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/why-i-still-use-meta-keywords#new-comment So I was wondering, because directories are always smaller scale than search engines would keywords that are normally high competition have more clout in them? If so then using them could be misleading to competition if they think they are the actual keywords? or might this contradict between your actual chosen keywords in the directories backlink anchor text or something?
On-Page Optimization | | Zoolander0 -
How could I avoid the "Duplicate Page Content" issue on the search result pages of a webshop site?
My webshop site was just crawled by Roger, and it found 683 "Duplicate Page Content" issues. Most of them are result pages of different product searches, that are not really identical, but very similar to each other. Do I have to worry about this? If yes, how could I make the search result pages different? IS there any solution for this? Thanks: Zoltan
On-Page Optimization | | csajbokz0 -
Does targeting more than one keyword or keyword phrase effect rankings?
Hi, We have a homepage where we are targeting three main keywords. 'Cheap books', 'buy books' and 'used books'. We are ranking well for cheap books and making progress on the more competitive buy and used. My question is how many keywords can you reasonably rank for on one page. We are targeting other keywords on other pages and having some success - but is three the maximum or is that too many?
On-Page Optimization | | Benj251 -
Main landing page does not rank as good a single news article - why?
We are running several special interest websites in the German speaking market, covering outdoor sports and vacation topics. We are trying to focus on one main landing page for events and keywords, this should be number one für search engines. Besides we are producing numerous content (news, pictures, videos), which are supposed to rank well and to be found on Google News, but not to rank higher for the specific keyword than our designated landing page. It seems, that we fail with this attempt. Example one: The main page for the alpine Ski World Championships on our skiing portal www.skiinfo.de was supposed to be this one: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3170--ski_wm_2011_garmisch-partenkirchen.html for the Keywords 'ski wm 2011' in Germany. We missed this goal. Many of our own news articles ranked higher. When searching for 'ski wm 2011' on skiinfo.de only directly after the World Championships, the main page was ranked on 33rd position - 32 of our own articles ranked higher. Why does the landing page rank worse than an article like this: http://magazin.skiinfo.de/3173-ski-wm-2011-tina-maze-gewinnt-riesenslalom-keine-deutschen-medaillen.html ? Another example: Our designated landing page for the Event 'International Mountain Summit' (a major mountaineering and climbing event in Bressanone/ITA) is this: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2148--international_mountain_summit.html (Keywords: international mountain summit, IMS). We are experiencing that our news articles rank higher, when they are 'fresh', this one still does: http://www.bergleben.de/klettern/2149-international-mountain-summit-4.html. Why? It would be perfect, if good content would strengthen the designated landing page. We are linking back to this landing page from each article in the breadcrumb, but this does not seem to be very successful. How can we achieve this?
On-Page Optimization | | Beatbuster0