Most websites focus on their home page which is of course a good idea. It is the most important page of your site whether you are looking at search engine optimization, internet marketing or customer conversion. Making sure you homepage is optimized and marketed should be of primary importance, but be sure not to forget your interior pages.
Often the arm chair optimizer will make the mistake of only trying to rank their home age. By this I mean they will only build links to the home page or make sure it is titled with the most important keywords and so on. And while the home page should get the most SEO love, it is also important to your online marketing success that you show your interior pages some SEO attention. Do you interior pages that aren’t ranking well, but should be? Not every keyword can be crammed on to your home page, although I’ve seen it attempted. A car dealer has tried this approach.
Supporting the Home Page
While marketing the home page is a monthly focus for us here at Big Oak, we are also aware of the power interior pages have for converting visitors into clients. We think of the home page as a lobby that helps direct you to the page that will provide the information or product you are searching for. If we can skip the lobby altogether and get the user directly to the page that would be better. That is unlikely to happen without providing deep linking to your interior pages.
Marketing Interior Pages
I like providing examples so here are some real world examples from our own clients. Our client ExhibitDeal provides trade show displays and accessories. Their number #1 term is “trade show displays” and as of today May 18, 2007 they are ranked #1 in Google (Trade Show Displays Ranking). They also rank #1 in Google for the term “trade show flooring (Trade Show Flooring Ranking Screen Shot). If you click the links to view the screen shots you will notice the #1 ranking for trade show flooring is an interior page of ExhibitDeal.
Trying to rank the home page for trade show flooring would have been impossible. So we marketing both keyword phrases for their respective pages and achieved high ranking rankings for both. Currently the trade show flooring page has 89 backlinks according to Yahoo. Not an extremely large amount but decent amount when a targeted strategy is applied to a single interior page. Of course it helps that the site has 4,374 links overall, but only 3,009 links are pointing to the home page.
Obviously it works for ExhibiDeal. Leading searchers to a page about trade show flooring when the search matches will increase sales.
Choosing Interior Pages for SEO
Decide on a a few interior pages that can help your conversion efforts. If placing a user directly on an interior page, bypassing the home page, would help the sale or get them calling wouldn’t you want that? After you have decided which pages might help your business if they ranked well, maybe 2 or 3, start optimizing them and then start link building.
Providing deep linking to these pages will allow your site to have increased value overall and not just on your home page and the search engines like to see a site with popularity throughout on just on the home page. This can increase you authority and your ranking for your entire site.
Sound link a lot of work? It can be, but the rewards will be a website with much higher search engine visibility. If you need help, Big Oak SEO is available.
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