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Does The Homepage Need To Rank For Its Own Keyword?

cleverliving
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Joined: 24 Nov 10
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Does The Homepage Need To Rank For Its Own Keyword?

i was looking at the website enligtenmentgatway.com and have noticed the lack of long tailed keywords. is it important to have the home page trying to rank for keywords or is it ok to have the just the secondary pages and post optimized for longtail keywords such as enlightmnmentgatway.com??? or maybe im just missing something
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cecille.l
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Hi Greg,

It's not the home page that needs to rank for its target keywords, but the inner pages. If you have no option to link to the related inner pages on your site, then the next best thing is to link to your homepage where users can click on the articles on the sidebar, but it's really the inner pages that you want to rank. This is why it's recommended you link related articles on your site as this helps increase their relevance to their target keywords.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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cleverliving
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Joined: 24 Nov 10
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yeah it does thanks. i just found it strange as i have always tried to have the main keyword in the title, and on home page to eventually rank for it and in this case it does not and you are still getting 300 people per day.

how much link building has gone into this site?
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cecille.l
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Hi Greg,

I'm sorry I do not have a quick answer for you. I will have to check on this with a senior staff and unfortunately they've gone now for the holidays. I've forwarded this to them regardless and will have an answer for you as soon as they get back early January.

I appreciate your patience. Please let us know if you have further inquiries.

Happy Holidays!


All the best,
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Cecille

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cecille.l
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Hi Greg,

I was able to hear back from a senior staff today and there has not been much link building done to the site since it was first set up, apart from the usual methods that Mark shows in the Affiloblueprint 3 course. It is a demo site for the course after all. New content has been continually added to the site though and it is updated on a regular basis.

The focus was placed on targeting specific pages for certain content topics rather than solely relying on single keyword traffic to the homepage. It's not to say that ranking for a main key phrase, or targeting one, on the home page is a waste of time, but it shouldn't be your main focus. This is what we have done with Mark's enlightenmentgateway.com site. It is similar to our Traffic Travis site, where we target "free seo software" and "seo software" on the home page (http://www.traffictravis.com) but get a lot of long-tail traffic from the Traffic Travis Blog that converts very well for us.

Hope that helps. Happy Holidays!


All the best,
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Cecille

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cleverliving
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great thanks for the reply. Its very interesting and eye opening
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internet.marketing1
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Joined: 07 Dec 13
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cecille.l it is interesting to read your posts. I need to ask one thing actually it might be a part of the above asked question. What if the home page is not optimized well (not enough backlinks) but one keep on building links for the landing pages then would it be a good chance that the site would given a good page rank?
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cecille.l
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Hi Alam,

Yes, it's possible that the site as a whole will rank well if most of its pages have top ranking for their target keywords. Traffic plays a major role in page rank. The more traffic you get on your page for the keyword you're targeting, the higher the chances of that page to rank high for those keywords. Still, it's best to optimize ALL pages on your site, including the homepage.

Hope that helps. Have a good day!
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Cecille

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This topic was started on Dec 14, 2013 and has been closed due to inactivity. If you want to discuss this topic further, please create a new forum topic.