Home Page Optimization
-
I only discovered SEOmoz about a week ago and my knowledge in this area has grown 500% in that time, but I'm still a newbie.
I'm looking for whether I have the right general idea or not with my home page in regards to SEO. The page is located at Line.com.
The top section with the images is 100% for humans. The next section is where the SEO comes into play. I have 5 different services [sports monitor, free sports betting, sports betting forum, sports handicapper websites, gambling affiliate program] that I offer on 5 different inner pages. What I'm trying to do is have my home page rank decently for my desired terms and then pass link juice to the respective pages. My goal is to eventually have my inner pages rank higher than my home page for my desired search terms.
Do I have the right general idea or am I way off? Is this too much for the search engines with all of the links and bold text?
Design criticisms are also welcome, and anybody who wants to critique the inner pages would be forever thanked. Feel free to be as harsh as you want as long as it's constructive.
Thanks!
-
I use to have a footer like you mentioned, but took it away to reduce the total number of links on the page. I only left the links that weren't already in the header.
Is my strategy bad? I guess that question answer's itself if SEOmoz does it.
-
OK, well as I mentioned earlier, I'd just have a clearer indication of what terms you want to rank for on each page. Concentrate on 2-3 terms for each page first, then move on to the secondary terms.
I'd ultimately change the URL of that inner page to http://www.line.com/sports-monitor and do a 301. Clean it up a bit, don't bold too many random terms that you are not trying to rank for, add page title + meta tags, and link to it (and other pages) internally from other pages and the new footer I suggested.
-
That's the tricky part. Like I said, my site provides 5 basic services, each with their own page, so I want those 5 pages to rank well. My home page doesn't provide a service (except gaining user interest) but I still have to put something in the title.
I wouldn't care if my home page were nowhere to be found in the SEs if the other pages all ranked well, but I also recognize that it will be far easier to get my home page to rank, and I don't want to just throw that away.
Edit: My preference for the inner page ranking ahead of the home page is only a small preference. I'm okay with the home page ranking first if it happens.
-
No problem
If you would prefer ranking for that term on that inner page, I'd suggest you first revisit your homepage ranking strategy. "Sports Monitor" is the very first word in your title tag - do you want to rank for that term for your homepage or for http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings?
-
Wow, I had no idea about the link priority subject. Thanks for the article. I toned down the keywords a bit, but will have to look at that aspect separately.
You are right, I was being overaggressive. I was focusing on just about every combination of words that I'd like to rank for rather than the 2-3 most important. I will revisit my strategy.
Thanks!
-
Thanks!
4: I'd prefer ranking for "sports monitor" but as I've only recently started thinking about SEO, I unfortunately didn't know that when I built the site. Is it worth 301ing to "line.com/sports-monitor"?
-
Hi,
I think the overall design is pretty good. My advice would be:
- Your homepage title tag seems too long
- You seem to be spreading your targeted terms on the homepage too thin. Based on title tags and bolded text, you seem to be targeting: Sports Monitor, Sports Betting Forum, Handicapper Websites, Sports Handicapping Monitor, sports betting social network, sports betting forums, sell sports picks, sports handicapping scams etc. I'd try to just focus on 2-3, start ranking well for those then go after some secondary terms
- Your choice of anchor text for links to inner pages seems a little odd. E.g. for http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings I assume you'd want to rank for something like "Sports Monitor". Thus, you should link to that page with the term "Sports Monitor" on the homepage, not "Accurate Sports Handicapping Monitor". The link to the http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-websites is worse - it's using anchor text "Web Design Skills" which is not what you want to be ranking for on that page.
- Some of the inner pages don't seem to be finished (title tags, meta tags etc) - e.g. http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings. Also, for that page are you trying to rank for "Sports Monitor" or "Sports Handicapper Rankings"? (or both?) I'd double check the URLs you are using.
Hope that helps!
Edit: I'd also add a better footer with basic internal linking structure. Even something like what SEOmoz has on this page is better than what you have with just the copyright info.
-
Just a few considerations:
-
You are linking from the menu and body of content to internal pages with arguably aggressive anchor text. There are plenty of articles that debate this practice and often would say the second link will not carry the anchor text. There is a really cool article about this here and I know Rand wrote an earlier one ages ago. I haven't tested it - so I can't 100% either way. Just something to think about when doing this strategy. Test it - and let me know what you come up with.
-
I don't get the internal linking to your sports website page, with the anchor text "web design skills". My best practice of internal linking is users first. Make it so a user is reading the article and can jump to a page that they would want to click on. (see what I did above - kind of similar approach).
-
Seems odd your H1 is below the fold, and is the same exact font/color as the titles above it.
-
I would say your a bit overagressive with your strategy, especially since I did a quick review of sites that do rank for these terms and yours stands out as the most aggressive. I'd suggest writing copy for the users not the search engines, and re-visit your content afterwards to find creative ways to integrate phrases that you'd ideally like to rank for.
-
Why not put some ALT tags on your page, especially your logo. Seems like "home" is pretty weak.
Best of luck on your SEO journey.
-
-
Hi Patrick, As you know that first impression is the last impression. So by building the home of our website attractive we can easily catch the audience.Simply by optimizing only the homepage is not important as well from SEO point of view but we have to optimize the most crucial pages which may bring the target audience & the conversion ration is also increased.
Mostly people don’t realize that the most common purpose of a website & the importance of their home page.Mostly people think that it helps to increase the interest, establish credibility & to promote their company & the products. But we should always kept in mind that we never tried to sell everything on the first page(home page) but it helps to make awareness.
There are some tips for Home Page to get optimized which helps us a lot.
From the above it is clear that home page is optimized for the customer & how they get attracted to our products/organization.
I hope that your query had been solved
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
-
Reasons Why Our Website Pages Randomly Loads Without Content
I know this is not a marketing question but this community is very dev savvy so I'm hoping someone can help me. At random times we're finding that our website pages load without the main body content. The header, footer and navigation loads just fine. If you refresh, it's fine but that's not a solution. Happens on Chrome, IE and Firefox, testing with multiple browser versions Happens across various page types - but seems to be only the main content section/container Happens while on the company network, as well as externally Happens after deleting cookies, temporary internet files and restarting computer We are using a CMS that is virtually unheard of - Bridgeline/Iapps Codebase is .net Our IT/Dev group keeps pushing back, blaming it on cookies or Chrome plugins because they apparently are unable to "recreate the problem". This has been going on for months and it's a terrible experience for the user to have. It's also not great when landing PPC visitors on pages that load with no content. If anyone has ideas as to why this may be happening I would really appreciate it. I'm not sure if links are allowed, by today the issue happened on this page serversdirect.com/dm/geek-biz Linking to an image example below knEUzqd
Web Design | | CliqStudios0 -
Our on page blog is off page! What?
Hi Moz Community, I have a customer who has a blog that is FULL of great unique content however the blog resides at a URL that differs from the main site. Eg. blog.mywebsite.com Instead of www.mywebsite.com/blog . With the latest Google updates I fear that this may be hurting our web ranking. In addition the web blog is a carbon copy of the main URL. My Question: I am going to schedule a meeting with the web designers, How vociferously should I argue for having them move the blog onsite and write 301 redirects for the current blog site?
Web Design | | CKerr0 -
Mobile tab for page speed insight
I am getting mobile error occurred problem.Can somebody help me about this issue? https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?hl=en&utm_source=wmx&utm_campaign=wmx_otherlinks&url=www.printez.com&tab=mobile Morris
Web Design | | PrintEZ0 -
One Page Guide vs. Multiple Individual Pages
Howdy, Mozzers! I am having a battle with my inner-self regarding how to structure a resources section for our website. We're building out several pieces of content that are meant to be educational for our clients and I'm having trouble deciding how to layout the content structure. We could either layout all eight short sections on a single page, or create individual pages for each section. The goal is obviously to attract new potential clients by targeting these terms that they may be searching for in an information gathering stage. Here's my dilemma...
Web Design | | jpretz
With the single page guide, it would be nice because it will have a lot of content (and of course, keywords) to be picked up by the SERPS but I worry that it is going to be a bit crammed (because of eight sections) for the user. The individual pages would be much better organized and you can target more specific keywords, but I worry that it may get flagged for light content as some pages may have as little as a 150 word description. I have always been mindful of writing copy for searchers over spiders, but now I'm at a more technical crossroads as far as potentially getting dinged for not having robust content on each page. Here's where you come in...
What do you think is the better of the two options? I like the idea of having the multiple pages because of the ability to hone-in on a keyword and the clean, organized feel, but I worry about the lack of content (and possibly losing out on long-tail opportunities). I'd love to hear your thoughts. Please and thank you. Ready annnnnnnnnnnnd GO!0 -
Site structure- category pages
Hi, I'm relatively new to SEO but have tried to apply all best practices to my site. However, I've hit a stumbling block when it comes to whether or not to index my category pages. http://istudyenglishonline.com/category/expressions-idioms/ General info: the site has been created with Wordpress and has a directory of English idioms. Each idiom is associated with one or more categories that it falls under (emotions, sports, food etc). Each category has its own page where the list of idioms will be. As each idiom often has more than one associated category, the same idiom will appear in different category pages, thus creating duplicate content. However, I have given each category page its own unique description. The issue is, when there are numerous idioms, the category page will have more than 1 page. I don't have the ability to create a unique description for each subsequent page of the main category. I know that the very model for some vertical search engines (such as indeed.com) is to create such landing pages and that the more "categories" that they have assigned to their job ads, in this case, the more pages created and the more pages indexed in Google. This seems to work very well for them. My question is, am I doing things right? Should I be doing anything to the subsequent category pages to avoid duplicate content? My plan was to have so many idioms associated with so many categories that I have a fair number of landing pages indexed in google, thus attacking the long tail keywords. However, I'm not sure if I am going the right way. Any advice would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | villarroel0 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
One big page vs. multi-step pages
Hi mozers! Brand new to SEO and LOVING it! Having several key questions that I don't see answered yet, but I'll start with one we've been very curious about. Consider this guide we have for Forming a Delaware Corp.
Web Design | | Mase
https://www.upcounsel.com/Free-Legal/Guide/17/Form-A-Delaware-Corporation This is our overview page, giving you a breakdown of what this process involves. We love this page, but (Question1:) does it lack better real "content" rather than lots of links to the guide process itself? Then, you can start to walk through the guide beginning with step one, where each step has crowd sourced answers to it. But as you see, the step pages are all very similar, except for the answers and step info. (Question 2) Would it be better to put all our answers into the one overview page and skip having separate pages for each step? We like the process and simplicity of seeing one step at a time, but then these pages don't seem to have enough unique content on them. Related, at what point (if any) is a page too big with too much content and considered bad for SEO? We're recovering from a big hit from Google, and slowly recovering by nailing down various SEO mistakes. We DO have great, unique and valueable content - now we just need it to rank!0