How to Optimize a Home Page?
-
Can anyone advise on what is the best way to optimise the home page?
Many websites I see include the target(focus) keywords from other pages on the home page. Is this self competition?
"Avoid Keyword Self-Cannibalization- It's a best practice in SEO to target each keyword with a single page on your site"
If an e-commerce website has 4 levels in the SEO architecture. Home Page, Brand Pages(Category), Range pages(sub-category) and individual product pages.
It would seem that the main keywords would be within the category(brands) level of a website. However many websites I see include these on the home page as well.
Could someone please clarify this? I do not recall seeing the report card saying Self-Cannibalization when these keywords(category level) are listed on the home page. However I could be wrong,
Please could someone advise on what SEO MOZs recommendations are for best practise on optimizing a home page so that it does not compete with category pages, or other pages on the website.
Thanks
-
You can definitely mention it, just don't make the homepage all about gastric band hypnotherapy. The trouble comes when both pages are targeting the same phrase.
-
i find this very interesting. If you have a page dedicated for the keyword gastric band hypnnotherapy, should you not mention this keyword on your home page?
-
Hi Liam,
I think that the same premise applies to meta title tags and keywords in general, so, yes, a good formula for a homepage title tag is: Brand - Core Business(es), even if the core business(es) have their own category pages.
You're right, if you turn a word on a page into an internal link, it shows the search engines that the destination page is targeted for that keyword. But again, I wouldn't worry about self competition unless you're actively targeting a keyword on two pages.
Best,
Kristina
-
Hi Kristina,
Thanks for your response.
Upon reflection I do not think I asked the question correctly.
I was more referring to the optimization of title tags on a page.
If target keyword is used on the home page or any other page than the its focus page(the one that should be the SERP for that keywords), best practice is to use internal linking? The focus keyword becomes a hyperlink to its target page. This prevents self cannibalization. I see that Wikipedia do this. Am I correct in this assumption? It is a different although related question.
Going back to my original question that I did not ask clearly enough-
Should the home page contain title meta tags that contain focus keywords from other pages. Typically for an e-commerce website the main focus keyword are one level down in the hierachy at the category level.
My understanding is that if I use the focus keywords from the target pages(category pages, this would be self cannibalization?
Would you agree with this premise, and if so the home page should only use Brand keywords. (Company name, Core business(e,g, importers of furniture, online furniture).
If you could clarify the answer to this question(Meta Title tags) and also if using internal linking is the best way to prevent self competition.
Many thanks
Liam
-
Hi WMA,
Before I start, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind when looking at other websites for SEO tips:
- Many websites aren't optimized for SEO (or, they're trying, but not 100% there)
- Big companies have more leeway in SEO, because they have so many backlinks.
To answer your first question, is it self competition to include target keywords from other pages on the home page, the answer is no, it's fine to have a target keyword on multiple pages on your site. But you shouldn't target two pages for the same keyword. For example, if all you sell is books, don't target your home page for the word "books" and have a category page for books. Then, if someone searches for "books," search engines don't know which page to display, and both of your pages will rank lower.
The bigger question, how do you optimize a home page, is trickier to answer. SEO isn't an exact science, and there are tons of ways that you can effectively optimize your homepage. Generally, I would say that your homepage should be targeting your brand name as a keyword, and include text about all of your types of products, and links to category pages. But your homepage is a representation of your company, so I can't really answer that question over Q&A.
Hope this helps!
Kristina
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
-
Should I set blog category/tag pages as "noindex"? If so, how do I prevent "meta noindex" Moz crawl errors for those pages?
From what I can tell, SEO experts recommend setting blog category and tag pages (ie. "http://site.com/blog/tag/some-product") as "noindex, follow" in order to keep the page quality of indexable pages high. However, I just received a slew of critical crawl warnings from Moz for having these pages set to "noindex." Should the pages be indexed? If not, why am I receiving critical crawl warnings from Moz and how do I prevent this?
Moz Pro | | NichGunn0 -
Why does one page rank while a similar page doesn't?
We have a blog post (actually several of them that have the same SEO characteristics) that brings a fair amount of traffic to our site (relatively speaking), and according to Google Webmaster Tools it averages in the top 10 in SERPs for various terms. This page has no external links to it, and very few internal links pointing to it. When I run Moz's On-Page Grader for the various keywords it ranks for, the page get's an F on all of them. It was not optimized for any keyword, and it isn't our best content; it was a blog post written a few years ago and forgotten about and was never promoted in any way. The topic does happen to be about something that people search for frequently. According to the keyword difficulty tool, all of the keywords it ranks for have 40-45% difficulty. We have lots of other pages on our site that we have tried to optimize and that get A's and B's in On-Page Grader, that have both internal (from the home page and main menu) and external links pointing at them, etc, but they don't rank well at all. Keyword difficulty for these keywords is in the same range, from 37 - 53%. Why does this one page rank so well when the other pages don't? Additionally, we have been looking at a competitor who has a page that ranks #1 in universal results for numerous keywords according to SEMRush, yet the page gets an F On-page Grader for those keywords. The page has 3 links to it, all from the same domain and it has a very low domain and page authority. The Domain Authority of this page is 47 and the page authority is 33 according to Open Site Explorer (compared with our DA of 30, and PA of 1), and the social metrics are a bit higher than ours, but neither has a lot (they may have 15 likes to our 10). Why does this page rank so well for them? How can we get our Page Authority higher? Thanks for any and all help.
Moz Pro | | mukunig1 -
My home page has an "A" rank in Moz and not ranking in Google.
My home page recently dropped from page one in Google to not being ranked for my top keyword. The page has an "A" ranking in MOZ for the keyword. Is there a way to find out the cause. I did have what looked like a duplicate page for a while 3 months ago when a domain was forwarding to my home page incorrectly. Appeared with second domain name instead of primary. Our business has been 95% through internet leads so quite an issue. Is there anyway to find out what is going on.
Moz Pro | | FredRoven0 -
How to increase page authority
I wonder how to increase the page authority or the domain authority to begin with. It seems you are putting a lot of weight on this in your analysis.
Moz Pro | | wcsinc0 -
Problem with Rankings and On-page Optimization
Hi SEOZ 🙂 I have a question regarding the Rankings and On-page Optimization in the seomoz Campaign Manager. I have setup a website url for examle: www.keyword.com After that created a list of all the target Keywords, that I want to reach within my Website: keyword-a, keyword-b, keyword-c and so on... Then I did a On-Page Analysis for all the urls with the specific keywords. keyword-a: www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ keyword-b: www.keyword.com/keyword-b/ keyword-c: www.keyword.com/keyword-c/ and so on... Most of the urls got the A grade. Now after the Website hast launched and got crawled, I have a problem with the Rankings and the On-page Optimization. The Rankings for my Keywords and also the Grades at the On-page Optimization are only shown for my Start/Homepage: www.keyword.com NOT for the urls that are specific for a Keyword for example: www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ Also the Grades are shown for the Keywords but again only in combination with my Start/Homepage www.keyword.com NOT for www.keyword.com/keyword-a/ What is the problem? Bye, Alex
Moz Pro | | krseo0 -
Duplicate Content being caused by home page?
Hello everyone, I am new to SEOmoz and SEO in general and I have a quick questions. When running a SEO Web Crawler report on my URL, I noticed in the report that my home page (also known as my index page) was listed twice. Here is what the report was showing: www.example.com/ www.example.com/index.php So are these 2 different urls? If so, is this considered duplicate content and should I block crawler access to the index.php? Thanks in advance for the help!
Moz Pro | | threebiz0 -
Experencing page authority issues after a 301 redirect
We just completed a build of a new site and used 301 redirects to retain our page authority. In the first week all the interior pages reported a page authority of 1 after 2 or so weeks the page authority began to look more accurate but they were still not as high as the original pages. The strange thing is that when you click on the link to a page the page authority populates correctly but when the page finally finished loading the PA goes back down. Has anyone ever experienced this and if so how did you fix it? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Jo_vortx.com0 -
Why are these pages considered duplicate page content?
A recent crawl diagnostic for a client's website had several new duplicate page content errors. The problem is, I'm not sure where the error comes from since the content in the webpage is different from one another. Here's the pages that SEOMOZ reported to have duplicate page content errors: http://www.imaginet.com.ph/wireless-internet-service-providers-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/antivirus-term http://www.imaginet.com.ph/berkeley-internet-name-domain http://www.imaginet.com.ph/customer-premises-equipment-term The only thing similar that I see is the headline which says "Glossary Terms Used in this Site" - I hope that the one sentence is the reason for the error. Any input is appreciated as I want to find out the best solution for my client's website errors. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | TheNorthernOffice790