SEO Question (surprisingly!)

[handcrafteduk]

Hi everyone,

I am trying to optimise the keywords on my site and am looking for some advice from those in the know.

My home page has been optimised with 'keyword 1'. From the homepage there is a link to a page which is optimised for keyword 2. Now, here is my question:

If I wanted to optimise for another keyword which is averagely competitive, is it possible for me to do this on a page which is buried three clicks away, via links, from the home page? In theory, if that page was optimised perfectly, would it rank as high as another site that had the same optimisation techniques with the difference being theirs was done on their homepage?

Does Google have a preference for weighting home pages as more relevant to a search query as opposed to if the words being searched were in homepage.com/page1/optimisedpage

Blummin heck....Did that make any sense?!!!

Gary

[incrediblehelp]

Why cant this page be one-click away from the home page?

[handcrafteduk]

Thanks for the reply.

Well, strange you should ask that - There is now a direct link from the home page to the page in question! :-)

[versuri32]

one-click away is the best, from your homepage

[Dubbya]

Google doesn't really seem to care if the home page or another content page is more relevant to the query. It'll serve up the most relevant page accordingly.

It's quite common for internal pages to rank higher and be returned in SERPs before the home page.

It's always best not to bury your content. One click from the home page should ensure that the page gets indexed often.

Using basic SEO techniques, your content pages can quite easily outrank and outperform a competitor's home page.

Work on acquiring inbound links to your content pages, not just your home page. "Help" and "How To" articles are great for this.

[Matteo]

Another issue to take into consideration is how pupular the 2nd keyword is.

Is it a niche type keyword? If so it should be easily indexed off the second level. There seems to be more problems in getting indexed high if it is an highly competitive keyword....and I don't know why.

Keywording the URL I suppose has something to do with it.
I currently try to run 2 or 3 keyphrases off the main page and do fairly well, but one is always the kingbird, and the other two are secondary.

[espectations]

In cases where it is not possible to link the page from the home page you could use a sitemap to ensure that the page is crawled:

According to Google Webmaster guidelines:
"Consider creating and submitting a detailed site map of your pages using Google Sitemaps. Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. "

[mjtaylor]

Google does give some extra weight to an index page, but as Dubbya pointed out, if a page has the content and is well optimized it can easily out rank the home page - even for a highly competitive phrase. What is often overlooked are links ... the most common reason the home page ranks better than internal pages is that there are more backlinks and more optimized internal links pointing to the home page ...

Cheers, MJ