Home Page Optimization
-
I only discovered SEOmoz about a week ago and my knowledge in this area has grown 500% in that time, but I'm still a newbie.
I'm looking for whether I have the right general idea or not with my home page in regards to SEO. The page is located at Line.com.
The top section with the images is 100% for humans. The next section is where the SEO comes into play. I have 5 different services [sports monitor, free sports betting, sports betting forum, sports handicapper websites, gambling affiliate program] that I offer on 5 different inner pages. What I'm trying to do is have my home page rank decently for my desired terms and then pass link juice to the respective pages. My goal is to eventually have my inner pages rank higher than my home page for my desired search terms.
Do I have the right general idea or am I way off? Is this too much for the search engines with all of the links and bold text?
Design criticisms are also welcome, and anybody who wants to critique the inner pages would be forever thanked. Feel free to be as harsh as you want as long as it's constructive.
Thanks!
-
I use to have a footer like you mentioned, but took it away to reduce the total number of links on the page. I only left the links that weren't already in the header.
Is my strategy bad? I guess that question answer's itself if SEOmoz does it.
-
OK, well as I mentioned earlier, I'd just have a clearer indication of what terms you want to rank for on each page. Concentrate on 2-3 terms for each page first, then move on to the secondary terms.
I'd ultimately change the URL of that inner page to http://www.line.com/sports-monitor and do a 301. Clean it up a bit, don't bold too many random terms that you are not trying to rank for, add page title + meta tags, and link to it (and other pages) internally from other pages and the new footer I suggested.
-
That's the tricky part. Like I said, my site provides 5 basic services, each with their own page, so I want those 5 pages to rank well. My home page doesn't provide a service (except gaining user interest) but I still have to put something in the title.
I wouldn't care if my home page were nowhere to be found in the SEs if the other pages all ranked well, but I also recognize that it will be far easier to get my home page to rank, and I don't want to just throw that away.
Edit: My preference for the inner page ranking ahead of the home page is only a small preference. I'm okay with the home page ranking first if it happens.
-
No problem
If you would prefer ranking for that term on that inner page, I'd suggest you first revisit your homepage ranking strategy. "Sports Monitor" is the very first word in your title tag - do you want to rank for that term for your homepage or for http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings?
-
Wow, I had no idea about the link priority subject. Thanks for the article. I toned down the keywords a bit, but will have to look at that aspect separately.
You are right, I was being overaggressive. I was focusing on just about every combination of words that I'd like to rank for rather than the 2-3 most important. I will revisit my strategy.
Thanks!
-
Thanks!
4: I'd prefer ranking for "sports monitor" but as I've only recently started thinking about SEO, I unfortunately didn't know that when I built the site. Is it worth 301ing to "line.com/sports-monitor"?
-
Hi,
I think the overall design is pretty good. My advice would be:
- Your homepage title tag seems too long
- You seem to be spreading your targeted terms on the homepage too thin. Based on title tags and bolded text, you seem to be targeting: Sports Monitor, Sports Betting Forum, Handicapper Websites, Sports Handicapping Monitor, sports betting social network, sports betting forums, sell sports picks, sports handicapping scams etc. I'd try to just focus on 2-3, start ranking well for those then go after some secondary terms
- Your choice of anchor text for links to inner pages seems a little odd. E.g. for http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings I assume you'd want to rank for something like "Sports Monitor". Thus, you should link to that page with the term "Sports Monitor" on the homepage, not "Accurate Sports Handicapping Monitor". The link to the http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-websites is worse - it's using anchor text "Web Design Skills" which is not what you want to be ranking for on that page.
- Some of the inner pages don't seem to be finished (title tags, meta tags etc) - e.g. http://www.line.com/sports-handicapper-rankings. Also, for that page are you trying to rank for "Sports Monitor" or "Sports Handicapper Rankings"? (or both?) I'd double check the URLs you are using.
Hope that helps!
Edit: I'd also add a better footer with basic internal linking structure. Even something like what SEOmoz has on this page is better than what you have with just the copyright info.
-
Just a few considerations:
-
You are linking from the menu and body of content to internal pages with arguably aggressive anchor text. There are plenty of articles that debate this practice and often would say the second link will not carry the anchor text. There is a really cool article about this here and I know Rand wrote an earlier one ages ago. I haven't tested it - so I can't 100% either way. Just something to think about when doing this strategy. Test it - and let me know what you come up with.
-
I don't get the internal linking to your sports website page, with the anchor text "web design skills". My best practice of internal linking is users first. Make it so a user is reading the article and can jump to a page that they would want to click on. (see what I did above - kind of similar approach).
-
Seems odd your H1 is below the fold, and is the same exact font/color as the titles above it.
-
I would say your a bit overagressive with your strategy, especially since I did a quick review of sites that do rank for these terms and yours stands out as the most aggressive. I'd suggest writing copy for the users not the search engines, and re-visit your content afterwards to find creative ways to integrate phrases that you'd ideally like to rank for.
-
Why not put some ALT tags on your page, especially your logo. Seems like "home" is pretty weak.
Best of luck on your SEO journey.
-
-
Hi Patrick, As you know that first impression is the last impression. So by building the home of our website attractive we can easily catch the audience.Simply by optimizing only the homepage is not important as well from SEO point of view but we have to optimize the most crucial pages which may bring the target audience & the conversion ration is also increased.
Mostly people don’t realize that the most common purpose of a website & the importance of their home page.Mostly people think that it helps to increase the interest, establish credibility & to promote their company & the products. But we should always kept in mind that we never tried to sell everything on the first page(home page) but it helps to make awareness.
There are some tips for Home Page to get optimized which helps us a lot.
From the above it is clear that home page is optimized for the customer & how they get attracted to our products/organization.
I hope that your query had been solved
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
-
19 Hours Excessive to Code Single Wordpress Page?
My developer says that is will take 19 hours to modify a listing page of the wpcasa London real estate theme because the existing template is difficult to customize. I am attaching an image of the existing page before customization and an image of a final mock up. Is 19 hours a reasonable amount of time to customize this page? Look forward to feedback. New Design is visible at: https://imgur.com/a/42XBqDD Alan IQ1i0kg
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
How to deal with 100s of Wordpress media link pages, containing images, but zero content
I have a Wordpress website with well over 1000 posts. I had a SEO audit done and it was highlighted that every post had clickable images. If you click the image a new webpage opens containing nothing but the image. I was told these image pages with zero content are very bad for SEO and that I should get them removed. I have contacted several Wordpress specialists on People Per Hour. I have basically been offered two solutions. 1 - redirect all these image pages to a 404, so they are not found by Google 2 - redirect each image page to the main post page the image is from. What's my best option here? Is there a better option? I don't care if these pages remain, providing they are not crawled by Google and classified as spam etc. All suggestions greatly received!
Web Design | | xpers0 -
Is it still necessary to have a "home" page button/link in the top nav?
Or is it not necessary to have a "home" tab/link because everybody by this time knows you can get to the home page by clicking on the logo?
Web Design | | FindLaw0 -
Existing URL structure and how to handle new pages before migration
Hi there! Currently, our site uses underscores "_" within the url structure. We are moving to Wordpress soon (the site is currently static html) but it will be a couple of months before the migration. Here is an example of the current structure: www.oldsitestructure.com/about_us/success_stories/custom_vinyl_banners When we do change, our url structure will have hyphen's "-" to separate terms, so the preferred new structure will be: www.oldsitestructure.com/about-us/success-stories/custom-vinyl-banners The entire site (with the exception of our Wordpress blog) currently uses the old structure. We have about 10 - 15 pages we will add before our migration, my question is: Should we use the preferred url structure starting NOW or stick with the old one? And set up 301 redirects are part of the migration process? Many thanks!
Web Design | | SEOSponge
Jon0 -
Multi-page articles, pagination, best practice...
A couple months ago we mitigated a 12-year-old site -- about 2,000 pages -- to WordPress.
Web Design | | jmueller0823
The transition was smooth (301 redirects), we haven't lost much search juice. We have about 75 multi-page articles (posts); we're using a plugin (Organize Series) to manage the pagination. On the old site, all of the pages in the series had the same title. I've since heard this is not a good SEO practice (duplicate titles). The url's were the same too, with a 'number' (designating the page number) appended to the title text. Here's my question: 1. Is there a best practice for titles & url's of multi-page articles? Let's say we have an article named: 'This is an Article' ... What if I name the pages like this:
-- This is an Article, Page 1
-- This is an Article, Page 2
-- This is an Article, Page 3 Is that a good idea? Or, should each page have a completely different title? Does it matter?
** I think for usability, the examples above are best; they give the reader context. What about url's ? Are these a good idea? /this-is-an-article-01, /this-is-an-article-02, and so on...
Does it matter? 2. I've read that maybe multi-page articles are not such a good idea -- from usability and SEO standpoints. We tend to limit our articles to about 800 words per page. So, is it better to publish 'long' articles instead of multi-page? Does it matter? I think I'm seeing a trend on content sites toward long, one-page articles. 3. Any other gotchas we should be aware of, related to SEO/ multi-page? Long post... we've gone back-and-forth on this a couple times and need to get this settled.
Thanks much! Jim0 -
How to redirect special pages to new domain?
Hello. I have 2 websites in diffrent category and i want to move some of my visitor that arrived in specific page of doamin1 (url like this: http://example.com/pages/.........)to root of domain 2.
Web Design | | vahidafshari450 -
Redirecting duplicate pages
For whatever reason, X-cart creates duplicates of our categories and articles so that we have URLs like this www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars
Web Design | | k9byron
www.k9electronics.com/dog-training-collars/ or http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar
http://www.k9electronics.com/articles/anti-bark-collar/ now our SEO guy says that we dont have to redirect these because google is "smart enough" to know they are the same, and that we should "leave it as-is". However, everything I have read online says that google sees this as dupe content and that we should redirect to one or the other / or no /, depending on which most of our internal links already point to, which is with a slash. What should we do? Redirect or leave it as is? Thanks!0 -
Best Home Page design examples - from a SEO perspective. Could You give me a few?
I am int he process of redesigning a home page and wanted to know from our community if anyone had examples on some great Homepage Designs from an SEO perspective. Things I am looking for : 1. Homepage URL/Design 2. Navitagion 3. Call to action Thank you, much appreciated. The home page I am redesigning is www.gunshotdigital.com Vijay
Web Design | | vijayvasu0