Getting Past The Landing Page: Moving up internal pages

[sheepfarmer]

I have a website that is around 7 months old. Most of my pages get an A in Traffic Travis. What bugs me a little bit is that my landing page comes up before the page that is optimized for the particular keyword that somebody has typed in.

I know that some people will come to the site anyway but they will have to look around a little bit to find what they are looking for and may therefore bounce right back out. Some of the optimized pages are pagerank 2 and still will not show up before the landing page.

My question is, in time will these pages move up on their own or will I have to do more backlinking to them (which I really do not want to do).

[jpastorizo]

Sheepfarmer,

I know this may seem a dumb question but Id ask it anyway so we can analyze what's going on with your site.
When you optimized your website with the keyword you were pertaining to - did you link to the main domain (home page) or did you link to the specific page?



Regards,
Renato

[sheepfarmer]

I linked to the specific page. I know that it is probably not that big of a deal. The bounce rate on avg. to this website is fairly low. The website has quite a few backlinks and the majority of the individual pages themselves have backlinks to them. That being said, the landing page itself has the bulk of the backlinks (by quite a few I imagine).

[jpastorizo]

You have to link to the specific pages. I know it is a pain but deep linking is crucial if you want to keep that bounce rate low. The more relevant the page is when a searcher lands on your site the better for the both of you.

Most people build majority of their links to their home page instead of deep linking. I think this is a huge no-no. Besides, when proper deep linking is done it will be easier for you to push your main page to a higher position in the SERPs for more competitive keywords.



Regards,
Renato

[sheepfarmer]

Thanks Renato

I did alot of deep linking early on (especially the pages that I really wanted to get ranked for) and some of the pages ranked for a little while then a few of them slowly faded.

The only pages that I have not deeplinked to yet are the last few that were published (they will soon get their backlinks though). The last 4 weeks or so I have been building the majority of the backlinks to the homepage in hopes of getting to page one for the one big keyword that is in my niche (which could take awhile yet). This website has 56 pages on it right now and most all of them have been backlinked to.

Again, I am not to worried about it, it just bothers me a little bit. I know that if I stuck some more backlinks to those individual pages they would move past my landing page. I was just wondering if with a little more age to the website if those individual pages would come back on their own.

[jpastorizo]

With regard to your last sentence, I am not sure what to tell you. one thing I know for sure is that the more deep linking done the easier it will be for you to rank your homepage highly on the SERPs for your main keyword.

[sheepfarmer]

I think I understand now. I need to turn my focus back onto the deeplinking is that right?

[jpastorizo]

Yes that is correct. When you do that the SEs will find it more natural cause your site gets links (in almost every internal page) from other sites. When these internal pages of yours are climbing up in rank you can start optimizing your homepage for your main keyword that you are targeting. Never link in pattern. You have to link as randomly as possible.