How Can I Safely Establish Homepage Relevancy With Internal Keyword Links?

[osaka73]

My website has roughly 1000-2000 pages.  However, our homepage is lacking relevancy as to what it is about.

One way that I'd like to tackle this problem, is by updating many of our pages with internal linking.

I often hear, use exact keyword links with caution, but have assumed this mainly referred to external backlinks.

Would it be a disaster to set up our single most relevant keyword on about 300 pages and point it to our homepage?

There are breadcrumbs on our site, but the home link uses an image (It's a picture of a house, if you're curious.)  Am I better off just to change that to our most relevant keyword?

I could use any advice on internal links for establishing better homepage relevancy.

Thank you!

[HashtagHustler]

Good Morning!

I would suggest taking a look at the Moz post on On-page Ranking Factors, in particular roughly at the bottom of the page there is a portion titled "An Ideally Optimized Webpage" which is almost a TLDR of the entire article and in my opinion spells out the structure of a perfect internal linking scheme very well.

I personally think it is natural that some of your pages may overlap what your homepage is optimized for. Obviously the more focused your homepage is, the better, but I try and make my homepage as specific as I can while still allowing me wiggle room to expand on the topic throughout the website. For some reason I always imagine the Taxonomy trees from my old Biology classes.

On another note a lot of Homepages will integrate a blog feed so that their content is continuously changing. Google is smart, and is always learning. I personally think we are slowly moving away from the days of designing/writing FOR Google. I try and organize everything in a way that my dad would understand. If he can figure out what my website is about, or how to get around, Google can.

(keep in mind with my previous statement, we still have to play by Googles rules and Best Practice for SEO, but just my own thoughts)

Hope that helps a little!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Make sure your homepage is in your sitemap, that all links that point to your homepage are not "nofollow"ed, and make sure that there is a brand logo that points to your homepage on every page of your site.

Do not use any exact match keywords on internal links for your homepage - "Home" or a logo are perfectly fine. You also don't want to link up your hierarchy often.

Take a look at these resources:
Internal Links (Moz)
Information Architecture for SEO - Whiteboard Friday (Moz)
Robots.txt and Meta Robots (Moz)
How to Have a Successful Local SEO Campaign in 2015 (Moz)
How to Perform the Ultimate Local SEO Audit (Moz)

I would also check to make sure that all of your social platforms are linking correctly, that you URL structures are consistent, and that your site is configured / redirecting URLs properly. Also, make sure your internal links are correct and consistent and that your www. or non www. redirects properly to your configuration (whether you chose www. or non www.).

Hope this all helps! Good luck!