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!
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
-
Structure of HTML Page
Hello, Is is true that search engine give more value to some part of the page than other ? Is only the main content considered ? or are the other also given weight but very small weight ? If I have div in the main content as those considered par of the main content or no ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage
Hi Everyone, I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution? For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets. Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two? Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Peter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RoyalBlueCoffee0 -
Keyword Planner - Landing Page Results
When i enter a landing page (a site page) in Google KW Planner Tool it returns an interesting set of results that I would like help with please? The first few results are relevant to that page BUT then it shows KW results that are for any page of my site. The fact that its reporting on the whole of my site rather than just that page - does it matter? ie will google be able to work it out which is the target page vs links to the rest of my site through the site navigation? The site had been live since June 2013 and we struggle to get on Page 1 SERPs, for most of our top themes and i wondered whether this could be a contributing factor? Thanks Ash
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AshShep10 -
Wordpress - Dynamic pages vs static pages
Hi, Our site has over 48,000 indexed links, with a good mix of pages, posts and dynamic pages. For the purposes of SEO and the recent talk of "fresh content" - would it be better to keep dynamic pages as they are or manually create static pages/ subpages. The one noticable downside with dynamic pages is that they arent picked up by any sitemap plugins, you need to manually create a separate sitemap just for these dynamic links. Any thoughts??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danialniazi1 -
Shopify Product Variants vs Separate Product Pages
Let's say I have 10 different models of hats, and each hat has 5 colors. I have two routes I could take: a) Make 50 separate product pages Pros: -Better usability for customer because they can shop for just masks of a specific color. We can sort our collections to only show our red hats. -Help SEO with specific kw title pages (red boston bruins hat vs boston bruins hat). Cons: -Duplicate Content: Hat model in one color will have almost identical description as the same hat in a different color (from a usability and consistency standpoint, we'd want to leave descriptions the same for identical products, switching out only the color) b) Have 10 products listed, each with 5 color variants Pros: -More elegant and organized -NO duplicate Content Cons: -Losing out on color specific search terms -Customer might look at our 'red hats' collection, but shopify will only show the 'default' image of the hat, which could be another color. That's not ideal for usability/conversions. Not sure which route to take. I'm sure other vendors must have faced this issue before. What are your thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | birchlore0 -
Always include the targeted keyword in the alt tag?
Studies show that using the targeted keyword in the alt tag helps to rank better for a keyword. But what if the keyword doesn't exactly describe the image, would you still use it in the alt tag? For example, say you have an image of the brain, but the article is about cognitive behavioral therapy -- an accurate description would say 'human brain' but an SEO alt tag may say 'cognitive behavioral therapy'--which would you use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Migrating a site with new URL structure
I recently redesigned a website that is now in WordPress. It was previously in some odd, custom platform that didn't work very well. The URL's for all the pages are now more search engine friendly and more concise. The problem is, now Google has all of the old pages and all of the new pages in its index. This is a duplicate problem since content is the same. I have set up a 301 redirect for every old URL to it's new counterpart. I was going to do a remove URL request in Webmaster Tools but it seems I need to have a 404 code and not a 301 on those pages to do that. Which is better to do to get the old URL's out of the index? 404 them and do a removal request or 301 them to the new URL? How long will it take Google to find these 301 redirects and keep just the new pages in the index?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster0