To get homepage to rank highly for a given term, do you only add the term(and variations) to the homepage?
-
If adding the term on all pages then won't the pages start competing with each other in the SERP?
I'm building a site for a client who wants to rank highly for 'Southern California general contractors' and its not clear to me whether to fit these keywords (and variations) only into the homepage or if I should try to fit them into all pages.
-
That's right Kenny - create unique content for each landing page (whether it's based on location, type of service offered etc).
Unless your brand name is 'California Personal Injury Attorney' (99.99% sure it wouldn't be) - then don't add the term to each and every one of your title tags. Add terms/keywords related to that page.
E.g. homepage might be 'California Personal Injury Attorney | ABC Lawyers'
A landing page based on injuries related to traffic accidents might be 'California Auto Accident Attorney | ABC Lawyers' or something similar.
-
I'm with you and I think Brad would agree that duplicate (or even largely duplicate) content would not be the end result behind landing pages dedicated to specific cities. If I were going to use this technique I would include city-specific content for each page.
Also, when you say 'duplicate title tags' do you mean MOSTLY duplicate title tags (ie Home | California Personal Injury Attorney, and About Us | California Personal Injury Attorney)? If so, are these really harmful to rankings?
-
You don't want to create duplicate title tags. It sends a bad signal to search engines, and you ultimately then create multiple pages that compete with each other for the same keywords.
When you're targeting various cities, you also need to exercise some caution. Brad mentioned 'breaking up landing pages depending on locations'. I'm not going to say that's wrong because I'm not sure exactly what he's getting at, but you don't want to create multiple pages with the the same, or largely the same content, where the only difference is the name of the city because this presents a duplicate content issue. And this isn't a 'technical' (honest mistake) duplicate content issue. This is a 'I think I can outsmart the search engines' kind of duplicate content issue.
-
That makes sense Brad, thanks!
So say one of my other clients wants to rank highly for 'California Personal Injury Attorney'. Should I not add 'California Personal Injury Attorney' to the title tag of every page (eg 'Contact Us | California Personal Injury Attorney', 'Home | California Personal Injury Attorney')?
If I did add this keyword to every title tag, would it damage my client's ranking in the SERP?
-
Hi Kenny,
You need to decide which terms you want to rank for which specific pages. E.g. if they are targeting 'Southern California general contractors' on the homepage, then you'll want to use that keyword a few times in the text on the page, title etc. The focus should be on that keyword, without making it look spammy.
However, you wouldn't want to try and target that term on every page on the site, it just doesn't make sense. E.g. you might have other landing pages that target 'welding', 'structural steel', 'maintenance and repairs' etc (I'm not exactly sure what you mean by 'general contractor' or what they do). On these pages, the focus should be on different keywords to 'Southern California general contractors'.
You could even break up the landing pages depending on locations. So have 1 for Los Angeles General Contractors, San Diego General Contractors and so on.
This might be a good start point - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization. Just don't try and over optimise in light of Google's recent algorithm changes. Create content that is useful to the consumer and you'll be fine.
Thanks,
Brad
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
-
Redirect effecting ranking?
I manage the SEO for several different regions which are also based on the same site e.g. example.com/au, example.com/us The /us site has pretty good rankings and changes I'm making to the site are having an impact. The /au site has really bad rankings, even though much of the content is the same. (The /uk site is also awful but we had an issue with 4,500 duplicate pages which were only resolved last week). Crawl diagnostics are only showing 1 major error for a 404 response, I'm receiving a domain authority of 43 and A grade page ranking for some of our targeted keywords. I could believe that this isn't necessarily going to get us a top 10 rating but I would have thought we would be in the top 50, especially for branded keywords. Could the lack of ranking be to do with how our domain redirects? If you go to example.com.au you are taken to the home page rather than being redirected to example.com/au. Once you head to an internal page the URL changes to example.com/au/page
Technical SEO | | ahyde0 -
What Would i do to get my site ranking high?
Hello Friends, I need your help please tell me what would I do to get my site ranking high in Google search engine. When I start my work on my site my work blog commenting , social bookmarking, keyword targeting etc.… But now the scene is completely changing. Now I am working on just guest blogging. I don’t understand that what would I do next after the guest blogging. Because I think there is now just one way to promote your site VIA guest blogging. Now please tell me is there any other option to work and get high ranking?
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
How can i improve alexa rank of my website
www.meetuniversities.com Meet Universities - Get connected to your dream university
Technical SEO | | debal0 -
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
Hi, We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS. I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com. Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ? The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301). Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject. Thank you very much 🙂
Technical SEO | | edantadis0 -
Optimising multiple pages for the same search term
We were having a discussion on title tags and optimising multiple pages for the same term. We rank well for the phrase 'chanel glasses' which points to our Chanel brand page. The Chanel brand page is optimised for this term, and has the phrase 'Chanel glasses' at the front of its title tag. Previously, the title tag on our home page had the words 'Chanel glasses' at the start in an attempt to rank twice for the term (as one of our competitors has managed). This never worked (though at the time, our DA/PA was lower than it is now). For this reason I switched the title tag on the homepage to try and rank for 'designer glasses'. My belief is, given we already rank highly for the term on a more relevant landing page, trying to rank for it again on the home page is not the best use of a title tag on our highest PA page. We may as well use it for something more generic like 'designer glasses' (though this term does not convert nearly as well, nor does it currently rank as well for us as we've not been attempting to get 'designer glasses' as anchor text. Plus it's more competitive. Another generic term maybe be preferable). My colleague's view is we should attempt to do what our competitor has done and try and rank twice on page one for this term. I like the idea of dominating the top results, but I feel that since attempting to get double-listed hasn't worked for us so far, we should use the homepage for optimising for a different term ( ideally something that we don't already rank for elsewhere on the site). I see his point of view - if we were ranking nowhere for the search term then, yes we should concentrate on getting one page to rank, not two. But since we already rank well for the term, perhaps his strategy is preferable? Just for clarity, the title tags are not duplicate, but the idea was to share many of the same keywords between the two title tags. What are your thoughts SEOmoz?
Technical SEO | | seanmccauley0 -
Where to get expert SEO help?
I joined SEOmoz knowing very little about SEO (it turns out even less than I thought!) I signed up because my business website that had be ranking very well for years made a fast and furious fall to the purgatory of page 2, 3, whatever. We'll I've definitely learned a lot and made a several changes that have helped. Specifically link building (directory submissions) and eliminating duplicate content. But we're still far below where we used to be and I've done everything I can do without making a career change to SEO. I've hired a few offshore SEOs to help but they have all failed to live up to their promises. So, I would love to find a GOOD SEO that can 1. Fix the remaining on-page technical issues in our CMS website (Business Catalyst), and 2. help us develop an SEO strategy for the next year. (I prefer not to post the name of the website for competitive reasons) Our keywords are really not very competitive at all due to the uniqueness of the business. Where should I look for help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Placeboo0 -
301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
Hi Guys, So here's the deal. Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page. The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice... Here are my questions: Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already? Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes? How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice? Any other tips on optimizing this process? Thank you for your time! -francois
Technical SEO | | nyakim0 -
Optimum Number of Links on Any Given Page
One of the guidelines you provide stipulates: "You should avoid having too many (roughly defined as more than 100) hyperlinks on any given page. When search engine spiders crawl the Internet they are limited by technology resources and are only able to crawl a certain number of links per webpage. In addition, search engine algorithms divide the value of some popularity metrics by the amount of links on a given page. This means that each of the pages being linked to from a given page are also affected by the number of links on the linking page. For these reasons, we recommend you include less than 100 links per page to ensure that they are all crawled, though if your pages have a high page authority, search engines will usually follow more links." As far as these 100 links are concerned, is this in reference to ALL links including outbound, internal, etc? Or is this referring to only outbound links to other sites?
Technical SEO | | johncmmc0