SEO Blog

A website isn’t a single entity. The moment you start believing that it is, is the moment that you lose sight of how to optimise and improve it.

A website is in fact a wider collective of smaller sites converging under one banner. In order to effectively optimise you need to treat each individual page as a unique entity. Continuity will be maintained through the design and navigation, but ultimately a website will only ever be as good as its weakest page.

Imagine, if you will, visiting a site with a stunning homepage. It has informative content, an exciting design and plenty to entice you in further. However, beyond the homepage the content becomes generic, the navigation is complicated and it is blighted by irregularities.

If you have come through the homepage you might be tempted to give the rest of the site a chance for redemption; however, what if you were to first land on a poorly designed page with little or no structure, would you give it the time of day?

This site may be half decent, but it certainly isn’t fulfilling its potential. To do this, each page must be treated as a unique entity and each page must be as important as the last.

Assuming that your website is currently searchable on Google, it is feasible that a visitor could land on any  one of your pages – in fact this is exactly what you want them to do. Why visit the homepage and hunt through the site to find what you want, when you can simply go to the most relevant service, category or product.

By optimising each page of your website, for both for visitors and search engine crawlers, you stand a far better chance of gaining additional rankings. But not only will you be getting new rankings, they will be for the words and phrases most relevant to your individual pages.

Of course optimising each page takes time, and for larger sites with limited resources this might prove challenging. However you don’t necessarily have to do everything at once. Content is always a good place to start, get 200+ words on your page, be it a product description or a services overview, and an optimised H1 heading. This will at least inform the search engines of this pages relevance to certain terms and will give a visitor a clear understanding if they should land here first.

Deep links are also key to optimising your individual pages. Ideally you should look to get a good percentage of incoming links to pages right throughout your site, not just the main homepage – in an ideal world you would have numerous links to each page. Use or request embedded links (those that follow a word of phrase) if at all possible, as this will add extra value and strengthen the page in the eyes of the search engine algorithms.

A good way of circulating your link strength and ensuring that each pages has an embedded link coming into it is by creating a blog. This will allow you to review your products or services, whilst providing information and passing on knowledge, providing an excellent opportunity to get people to your pages. Don’t however try to set up satellite websites for this same purpose, this is technically blackhat SEO and may see you punished.

Ultimately though any website is looking for targeted visitors, So the more focused each of your pages are, the more likely it will be that the people that visit your site will be in greater quantities and interested in what it is that you have to offer. Every page on your website is important; whilst you shouldn’t turn your back on the strongest and most important, your homepage, you also need to make sure that all others are afforded similar attention when it comes to optimisation.