Will using my Homepage as a KW target improve my Inner page Ranking?
-
Hello your help please!
I have 2 KWs that i have targeted Inner pages for and they have got them to page 2 in SERPs, but now its getting difficult to move them up to page 1.
Will targeting the home page with a higher authority, for the same terms, help or hinder the inner pages current position?
Many Thanks
Ash
-
Thanks for your help Jane!
I will get on to it and make the changes.
Ash
-
Hi Ash,
It's generally advised that you either target a keyword with the home page or with an internal page and not both, so depending on which resource you choose as the one you want ranking, I would target that page and that page alone. This is an old post but it illustrates the point well.
-
Thanks Jane
I have only just change the home page Title as i thought it might help give the internal pages a boost, but from what you say, its only likely to compete with them so i should change these back to more generic KWs on the home page?
On that note, if all my internal pages are targeting all my KWs, what should i target on the home page, previously i used more generic terms like, Personal Finance & Over 50s Insurance?
Ash
-
Hi Ash,
I haven't, but the code for the menu is definitely appearing twice in the source, once under
id="Mmenu" class="show-on-phones SpeedyDropDown"> class="MenuCenter"><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">class</a><a <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">="toggleMenu" href="</a>#">Menu <nav <span="" class="webkit-html-attribute-name">class="main-navigation"> nav
id
dnn_MENU2
and once under
<navclass="mega-navigation"><divid="dnn_menu1">I would say that the home page could be a good target for those two keywords, especially given you are prioritising it in key areas like the home page title tag. You have a bit of a keyword cannibalisation issue here right now because you have the internal funeral planning page and the home page essentially targeting the same set of keywords.</divid="dnn_menu1"></navclass="mega-navigation"> </nav>
-
This is always a tough decision. Typically I make my SEO mind take a backseat, and check the usability aspects. Are people utilizing all of the links in the Mega Menu, or is there a point in each section where people stop looking. If the mega menu isn't being used to it's full potential, then you can start looking at ways to improve the usability of those pages.
My favorite example of menu limiting is the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ I believe Distilled worked with them on this. Ted Ulle would often present that people would click far more times into a site than the typical "3" that everyone quotes. He disproved it with several case studies. The way he achieved more clicks is by gamificiation of sorts. If you gave the user enough reinforcement that they were headed in the right direction they would keep clicking up to 6-7 pages in, according to him.
So, if I was analyzing the usability I would determine at what point would a specific visitor enter the site, based on marketing and SEO, and how effective is the website at getting them to the info they need?
I would then examine the home page to determine if I could effectively get someone someplace without the need of a mega menu. You have tons of options to choose from, so it would take analyzing the motivational force with each visitor, and using those sources to encourage a click in deeper.
As for the two menu problems, I do see it in the source when looking at it. You would be better off using a script to change the menu for mobile instead of having two separate menus.
I haven't checked any of this code, but this was a resource I found quickly: http://responsivenavigation.net/
-
HI Jane thanks for your advice the 2 keywords are prepaid funeral plans (19th) & compare funeral plans (8th)
The site is www.over50choices.co.uk
With regards to internal linking structures please see the response i gave Cody - have you come across this before?
Thanks
Ash
-
HI Cody thanks for this, I will check out the IIS Server issue later as i am away from the office for a few days, but with regards to my Internal Links, GWTs actually says that some pages have 1000 internal links and i cant find out why!
The site is built on a DNN CMS platform and somebody said that the internal links were due to the Mega Menu & Mobile menu doubling up the links, but i have never trusted this advice?
If you look at the site in google cache it shows 2 navigation menus?
Its always concerned me that every page appears to be linked to every page...?
How can i resolve this?
Ash
-
Hi Ash,
This can make sense on occasion, but we'd want to look at the specific example to know if this was the right move. Google would prefer to direct users to the most relevant page, which in a high number of circumstances is the internal page rather than the home page.
You can often see internal pages rank well for keywords where they have very few inbound links from third parties, due to the strength of the site as a whole and the site's good internal linking. For instance, there are only 12 unique domains linking to Very's swimsuit page (http://www.very.co.uk/women/swimwear-beachwear/swimsuits/e/b/1769.end), but the page ranks page 1 in the UK for [swimsuits]. Only Debenhams itself links to http://www.debenhams.com/women/swimwear-beachwear/swimsuits, which ranks one place better than Very for the same query.
-
Forget to link the IIS SEO content: http://moz.com/blog/what-every-seo-should-know-about-iis
-
Well, the first thing to consider is the keyword cannibalization: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization
Optimizing several pages for the same exact keywords can lead to lower rankings across the board. I just tested this with my own site a couple weeks ago, and it produced the same results as before. So, trying to rank your home page and internal pages can cause a problem. This isn't an exact thing, but it is possible.
One thing I did notice about your website is that you are using an IIS based server, which is case sensitive. That means that the server considers a /Health/ page to be separate to a /health/ page. Your website utilizes uppercase URLs in the menu, but still displays the lower case if types in. Are your external links going to the correct style URL? If not, I would suggest fixing this problem. You could be leaking authority.
You also have a tremendous amount of links on every single page. That means that the authority that you pass internally between pages is miniscule, and doesn't provide much value. Checking one of your pages I found over 400. 400 isn't a big deal with a super authoritative website, but with a DA of 27 you will struggle to get internal pages to rank.
Other things to consider on those pages is the page speed and server requests.
-
If your home page has content that is related to the inner page then there is a possibility. With all the Google updates, super relevant in depth content pages related to keywords have the best chance for ranking.
You should also look at the sites ranking on the first page and analyze all the on page and off page factors that are getting them to rank. Compare these factors with your own site and work on them to make it better.
-
We link naturally to the Inner pages with variants of the keywords and continue to link via blog posts varying the key phrases.
Ash
-
What's your internal linking like? Are you linking as often as reasonable to these inner pages with your keyword, or as naturally close to your keyword as you can be?
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
-
Ranking without use of keywords on page & without use of matching anchor text??
Howdy folks. So, here is a dilemma. One of competitors of ours is somehow ranking for a keyphrase "houston chronicle obituaries" without any usage of these keywords on the page, without any full or partial anchor text match ("chronicle" is not used anywhere). The rest of competitiors' rankings make sense. Any ideas?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DmitriiK0 -
Fresh page versus old page climbing up the rankings.
Hello, I have noticed that if publishe a webpage that google has never seen it ranks right away and usually in a descend position to start with (not great but descend). Usually top 30 to 50 and then over the months it slowly climbs up the rankings. However, if my page has been existing for let's say 3 years and I make changes to it, it takes much longer to climb up the rankings Has someone noticed that too ? and why is that ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
URLs: Removing duplicate pages using anchor?
I've been working on removing duplicate content on our website. There are tons of pages created based on size but the content is the same. The solution was to create a page with 90% static content and 10% dynamic, that changed depending on the "size" Users can select the size from a dropdown box. So instead of 10 URLs, I now have one URL. Users can access a specific size by adding an anchor to the end of the URL (?f=suze1, ?f=size2) For e.g: Old URLs. www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size5 New URLs www.example.com/product-alpha-size1 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size2 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size3 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size4 www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?f=size5 Do search engines read the anchor or drop them? Will the rank juice be transfered to just www.example.com/product-alpha-size1?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Blog home page and ranking
My question is in regards to ranking a blog under our domain www.xxx.co.uk/blog If we are targeting pc blog should the home page have some content in the side bar or somewhere that stays there contantly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Link to homepage or brand page?
Hi, I have opportunity to get a link from a brands website to our website as we are official retailers. Should I give them our homepage URL or should I give them their brands page on our website? The brand page will have their brand name in the URL, meta details, images, content and products. What is more beneficial SEO wise? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YNWA0 -
What Sources to use to compile an as comprehensive list of pages indexed in Google?
As part of a Panda recovery initiative we are trying to get an as comprehensive list of currently URLs indexed by Google as possible. Using the site:domain.com operator Google displays that approximately 21k pages are indexed. Scraping the results however ends after the listing of 240 links. Are there any other sources we could be using to make the list more comprehensive? To be clear, we are not looking for external crawlers like the SEOmoz crawl tool but sources that would be confidently allow us to determine a list of URLs currently hold in the Google index. Thank you /Thomas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sp800 -
Geo-tagging using cookie - Is it Good or Bad for Rankings
We have a fairly large site which does a cookie-based 302 redirect to the the specific city page if someone types in the Home page URL. Though if the cookie is not available (first time user) it goes to the Homepage and asks user to select the city as our services are city specific. Everything is working fine with this setup. Though our tech team now wants to display the contents of city page on homepage URL itself if the cookie is available without 302 redirecting to new URL. Though no-cookie available scenario remains unchanged. Technically, I think this change should work fine without any ranking issues as still the first time users see the actual homepage as does Googlebot. Please confirm possible issues in rankings with this change from your experiences as based upon city present in the cookie homepage will display different content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Why does this 1-page doorway rank #2?
Search on "santa cruz custom cabinets." In my SERPs, I'm seeing exact match santacruzcustomcabinets.com rank #2. This is a 1-page site provided by Yellow Book as part of an ad it sold to this cabinet shop. The site has no other pages, no inbound links, etc. So much for Google saying it's going to turn down the meter on exact match domains because that's all I see this website, if you want to call it that, has going for it. what do you see? Why is it ranked so high? Why is it above the site below it for example? And why doesn't Google lower the boom on Yellow Book for these doorway pages? Thought you'd all find this interesting. Any comments?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KatMouse0