Search Engine Optimisation – A Site Wide Approach For More Traffic

Many search engine optimisation efforts are focused on promoting the home page of a site to the top of the search engines. This is a fundamental mistake that can result in the site missing out on a lot of traffic.

A site should be designed to draw traffic through both the home page and various internal pages. A home page, obviously, should be tailored to the primary keyword phrases you are seeking….but one must not forget that there are many possible search terms that visitors could use and internal pages of your site should be optimised to seek traffic from these secondary keyword phrases.

Effectively optimising a website does not happen by chance and should be planned. Keyword research should be conducted to determine what people are actually searching for that relates to your business.

Obviously, the home page will target your primary keyword phrase and related secondary keyword phrases. The rest of the site should then have pages that individually target their own keyword phrases with a logical structure that will allow both normal visitors and search engines to find every page on your site.

Take for example a website on fashion. There are many topics that could be included in a website about fashion including dresses, shoes, handbags and each of these could be further categorised by material used, brand, size or any other number of categories.

In the example of optimising a site for handbags this is where it is very likely that if a site is properly optimised then someone searching for Gucci handbags would go to a page that is set up to focus just on Gucci handbags. This makes logical sense and the search engines would see this page as more relevant to the visitor than the home page which might highlight other designer brands.

With a properly structured and optimised site, as you review your site’s stats you may start noting a majority of your traffic is coming in through internal site pages, not the home page. In the above example it is very likely that many people searching for specific brands of handbags would rarely come first to the home page of the site.

The home page of a site is critical in a search engine optimisation campaign. Just keep in mind it isn’t the only page that can draw free traffic and revenues to your site.