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Which Page to Link to for Your Main Search Terms
Author: Ryan Ward | December 9, 2007One of the main areas that I service on my real estate website is the city of Alpharetta and for the last year, I have pushed all of the links to that page on my site to try to rank that page for that term. I was stuck around the middle of page one and couldn’t seem to get any higher. I had an indented listing for “alpharetta real estate” with my internal “Alpharetta” page above my homepage.
I had a thought that because my homepage would naturally have more PR than an interior page, I would go through and point those “Alpharetta real estate” links to my homepage and use my “Alpharetta” page to rank for a slightly less competitive keyword that actually applies more to the page - “Alpharetta homes for sale”
So what has happened? Well, it’s been about 3 weeks since i made the change. My position has fluctuated on page one since making the change which I anticipated, but, the only change that I have seen noticeably is that now my homepage is above my interior page in the indented listing and still fluctuating.
So what did I learn so far? I’m not really sure yet because the link changes will take more time to adjust, but, the fact that I didn’t drop off of the first page may be a good sign.
The part that concerns me about this is that I may be affected user experience somewhat because they may land on the homepage instead of directly on the desired city page. If i did not have an indented listing, I would not have made the switch.
Topics: Testing |
March 9th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
So it is now 3 months later and you rank 3 & 4. Did you stick with the plan you had? It seems your plan has worked, but it is hard to tell when you do so many different things.
March 9th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I switched it back Dennis. I thought about it and decided that a better user experience would be to have people get the internal page that better applies to their search. I guess I should do a follow up post…Sometimes SEO is really about people optimization.