Ranking a homepage for keywords
-
We recently found a handful of keywords we would like our homepage to rank for (for example - customer experience). On our homepage we have articles (4-5 posted daily) that feature the keywords we are targeting (one being customer experience). How do the keywords we are using in our daily articles that are posted to the homepage affect the overall keyword ranking for the homepage?
In other words do the keywords used in the articles (title, first 2-3 paragraphs, meta description, etc.) all roll up/build up to the homepage's keywords or how does that work?
-
Hi Carly,
if you want to know more or need further help: Bryan Dean's On-Page SEO Anatomy infographic serves as a good start.
You may also provide a more concrete example by a private message via my profile page. I can help you.
-
Wow, this is great, thank you! Do you have any advice for those looking to create or determine a "hub" page?
-
Hi, Joost De Valk wrote a great article on this subject in 2011:
“You see, sites don’t rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you’ll need to determine which page is going to be the page ranking for that keyword....Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One “hub” page, if you will.”
Now that you understand that you should probably create a page in an url http://www.domain.com/keyword rather than trying to rank http://www.domain.com — here’s the answer as best as I can give easily since Google is secretive.
3 Basic Factors:
- relevancy signals
- internal and outbound linking
- content freshness
1. Relevancy Signals
Bryan Dean's article gives, among other ranking signals, a good overview of relevancy for a page (not a site), many of which you mentioned:
- Keyword density and latent semantic indexing
- Heading and meta tags. See: http://cbutterworth.com/do-h1-tags-still-help-seo/ and much more..
- Content length. See: http://blog.serpiq.com/how-important-is-content-length-why-data-driven-seo-trumps-guru-opinions/
It is reasonable to presume that when Google goes through your site (perhaps via an sitemap) it does make some minor conclusions about the general themes of your site and that may affect your homepage’s rank.
2. Internal and Outbound Linking
Now, this is the easiest way to affect the rank of your homepage with the help of the posts you are doing. Make sure to link to the latest news, categories and tag cloud on your homepage.
You may show posts from a specific category, where the category is the keyword for which you want to rank. Thus Google sees that your homepage displays keywords and links about that topic prominently.
Don’t go overboard obviously. 3 latest news items in the category defined by the keyword, a link to the keyword as category and as tag or two is plenty enough for the homepage.
3. Content Freshness
Cyrus Shepard’s 2011 post on the Moz Blog serves as a good introduction to how content freshness might impact your site:
“Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.Some SEOs insist you should add 20-30% new pages to your site every year. This provides the opportunity to create fresh, relevant content, although you shouldn’t neglect your old content if it needs attention.”
Google also measures how your users react to your content:
“As content becomes outdated, folks spend less time on your site. They press the back button to Google's results and choose another url. Google picks up on these user behavior metrics and scores your content accordingly.”
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
-
I'm monitoring the organic keywords for a website, what do their organic keywords tell me?
Should the keywords they already rank well for make good topics for them to exploring in the future?
Keyword Research | | RonkeIR0 -
This page could be penalized as keyword stuffing?
Dear Mates, This sample page is http://goo.gl/kGljFX Title tag: Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Coupon Code 30% - Buy Page Meta Desc: Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Coupon Code 30%: Convert both Standard-Definition and High-Definition formats, super fast speed. H1: Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Coupon Code H2: Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Key Functions: H2: Wondershare Video Converter Ultimate Detailed Features: Could you take a look and let us an idea? Thank you Claudio
Keyword Research | | SharewarePros0 -
Keyword difficulty report - am I stupid??
Hi, Im a programmer but SEO newbie and I am trying out Moz Pro. To be honest I feel really disheartened right now, I find the world of SEO very difficult and full of conflicting information. Anyway, I am trying to get my head around the Keyword difficulty tool in order to determine what keyword I want to go after and what I would need to do in order to outrank the competitors. The website with the highest PA, most external links to the domain (4000 versus around 80-90), the most linking root domain and the best on page optimasations ranks nr 5. The website that ranks 1 is the only one with good social signals. All of the websites has the keyword in the page title. What am I missing? This makes no sense to me. Is this Keyword tool reliable? VERY grateful for any help from you guys.. /Emma
Keyword Research | | EmmaGrey0 -
Using a country in your keywords
My company has recently started offering services in South Africa - which is great - same language - lot of potential there. But I suspect our keyword research is suffering from "thinking like a foreigner". i.e. "buy cars South Africa" rather than "buy cars". Wouldn't google.co.za naturally assume: 1) Anyone using their service for "buy cars" is looking for "buy cars South Africa" (I know it's more complicated - Google will give different results the more it can figure out about your location) 2) That any co.za site optimised for "buy cars" is automatically 90% optimised for "buy cars South Africa" too - so isn't a productive long tail query (against something like “buy sports cars”) I appreciate that some companies will be TARGETING foreign browsers (i.e. holiday accommodation South Africa) so will need to explicitly optimise their on-site for the country for “foreign search engines”. But I'm asking about companies in South Africa targeting people from South Africa.
Keyword Research | | Ali310 -
Keyword Research Tool
Which tool is most reliable to do Keyword Research ? I have observed that data in Google Keywords Tool seems to fluctuate a lot. For instance a particular keyword in GKT had an exact Global Search Volume of 2800 3 days back , today it is around 1200 . I can not make decisions on such unreliable data ...
Keyword Research | | iamnew0 -
Is there anyway to view the Keyword Ranking Report with the Google traffic estimator stats?
The Keyword Ranking Report currently shows site traffic and Google SERP. Is there anyway to also show google traffic estimator next to these numbers?
Keyword Research | | brianmeert0 -
Why is Adwords Keyword Tool showing zero search volume for popular keywords?
When I try to ascertain search volume for the the words "pills" "drugs" and "medicine" it is showing "-" for all types of search volume, including phrase, exact, and broad. Why is this?
Keyword Research | | nicole.healthline0 -
Effective keyword grouping - any suggestions?
I have a specific question regarding keyword grouping. Whenever I've have compiled a (long) list of keywords, I create smaller groups of keywords that can be targeted by a category or page. However, I find this to be quite labour-intensive as I'm doing this work manually through filtering in Excel. To illustrate what I mean, here's an example of a keyword list: baby shirt
Keyword Research | | DeptAgency
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts
pregnancy gifts Normally I would create a list of root words, like this: baby
shirt
pregnancy
gift I would then manually filter the list on each root word and copy the filtered list to separate tabs, which would result in lists like this: baby
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby shirt
baby shirt
t-shirt for baby
pregnancy shirts etc. As you can imagine, this is a lot of work. So my hope is that you can help me out with a smart tool / Excel formula / ??? to automate this process. Thanks for any suggestions!0