Website URL Structure - keyword targeting on homepage vs internal pages
-
I have developed a few websites before where the homepage contains the content for the keywords I was targeting. This has been reasonably successful as I have found it easy enough to get links to the homepage.
I am considering a new site in a totally different industry that I am thinking about structuring like this:
mybrand.com (not necessarily targeting any keywords)
mybrand.com/important-keyword-1/ (definitely want to target)
mybrand.com/important-keyword-2 (equally important as 1st keyword)
There will be several (30-ish) other pages targeting keywords but they are not as significant as the two mentioned above, more so they are about publishing informative information. The two important keywords are quite different but industry related.
My questions are: should I be careful targeting keywords away from the homepage when the homepage gets the most links? Would I be better off building 2 different websites where the keyword content is captured in the homepage?
Thanks,
-
The majority of your inbound links will likely be to the homepage. If one set of keywords describes what you do but are shorter tail than the rest, those are good homepage keywords. You will naturally attract more homepage links though - so the authority should be much higher overall.
-
Thanks for responding.
Yes, the keywords are somewhat related like your example of the wedding and portrait photographer. Can I ask, why would you put the harder keyword on the home page and not on an internal page eg. http://mybrand.com/keyword-1/?
-
I think this depends on how much different the focus KWs are. For a wedding & portrait photographer, I would target the harder KW (wedding) to the homepage and "portrait" to a "services" page (along with a backup "wedding" page - that was optimised differently. Having both on one site would be fine since they're related.
However, if you sell tents and do tours of Africa, well ... I'd probably have two sites for that. If you sell tents and you're a personal trainer, two sites for sure.
Hope that helps!
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
-
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
How to de-index old URLs after redesigning the website?
Thank you for reading. After redesigning my website (5 months ago) in my crawl reports (Moz, Search Console) I still get tons of 404 pages which all seems to be the URLs from my previous website (same root domain). It would be nonsense to 301 redirect them as there are to many URLs. (or would it be nonsense?) What is the best way to deal with this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Why is this SERP displaying an incorrect URL for my homepage?
The full URL of a particular site's homepage is something like http://www.example.com/directory/.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheEspresseo
The canonical and og URLs match.
The root domain 301 redirects to it using the absolute path. And yet the SERP (and the cached version of the page) lists it simply as http://www.example.com/. What gives? Could the problem be found at some deeper technical level (.htaccess or DirectoryIndex or something?) We fiddled with things a bit this week, and while our most recent changes appear to have been crawled (and cached), I am wondering whether I should give it some more time before I proceed as if the SERP won't ever reflect the correct URL. If so, how long? [EDIT: From the comments, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8QKIweOzH4#t=2838]0 -
Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?
Hey guys /gals I have a question please. I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related. However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page. So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank. Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new? In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW? In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same? I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5 Thank fellas Marshall
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarshallThompson0 -
Why does my home page show up in search results instead of my target page for a specific keyword?
I am using Wordpress and am targeting a specific keyword..and am using Yoast SEO if that question comes up.. and I am at 100% as far as what they recommend for on page optimization. The target html page is a "POST" and not a "Page" using Wordpress definitions. Also, I am using this Pinterest style theme here http://pinclone.net/demo/ - which makes the post a sort of "pop-up" - but I started with a different theme and the results below were always the case..so I don't know if that is a factor or not. (I promise .. this is not a clever spammy attempt to promote their theme - in fact parts of it don't even work for me yet so I would not recommend it just yet...) I DO show up on the first page for my keyword.. however.. instead of Google showing the page www.mywebsite.com/this-is-my-targeted-keyword-page.htm Google shows www.mywebsite.com in the results instead. The problem being - if the traffic goes only to my home page.. they will be less likely to stay if they dont find what they want immediately and have to search for it.. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chunkyvittles0 -
Google is ranking the wrong page for the targeted keyword
I have two examples below where we want it to rank for the targeted page but google picked another page to rank instead. This is happening a lot on this site I just recently started to work on. Example 1 Googles Choice for key word Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/cl/50/Tires-and-Wheels What we want Google to choice for Motorcycle Tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/49/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Other pages about Motorcycle tires: http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/d/12/Motorcycle-Tires We even used the rel="canonical" for this url to point to our target page. http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/50/-/181/Motorcycle-Tires Example 2 ATV Tires We want this page to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/c/43/81/165/ATV-Tires however google has decided to rank http://www.rockymountainatvmc.com/t/43/81/165/723/ATV-Tires-All that is acutally one folder under where we want it.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DoRM0 -
How canonical url harm our website???
Even though my website has no similar/copied content, i used rel=canonical for all my website pages. Is Google or yahoo make any harm to my SERP's?? EX: http://www.seomoz.org is my site, in that i used canonical as rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://www.seomoz.org" to my home page like that similar to all pages, i created rel=canonical. Is search engine harm my website???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MadhukarSV0 -
Should you replace the url on a damaged page and 301 to it ?
Hi, We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links. I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%. My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?. Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc. Thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0