How many homepages does your website have?

The conventional wisdom is that your website has one homepage – not necessarily true. You can have multiple homepages. You can design dozens of pages that look like homepages but are actually buried somewhere on your website and are precision-optimized for a particular keyword phrase.

My Tactical Execution website has 68 homepages. One is my actual homepage but there are 67 others that target various phrases. I call them “surrogate homepages.” Each one looks similar to my actual homepage. Depending on what you search for, Google lists the most appropriate one.

Google has no inherent preference for a website’s actual homepage. It looks at all pages equally and delivers the pages best suited to the search query. When someone searches for a particular phrase and Google delivers one of my surrogate homepages among the search results, the searcher doesn’t care if it’s my actual homepage or not. They just want to find the information they’re looking for.

Obviously, my primary homepage is:

http://www.tacticalexecution.com/

The other 67 homepages each target a different geographic location along with the phrase “internet marketing services.” For example, I target San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and a variety of other municipalities in the Bay Area, each with the same phrase. One such page can be found at the following URL:

http://www.tacticalexecution.com/contact/san-francisco-internet-marketing-services/

As you can see, the page is called “San Francisco internet marketing services” and I have similar pages for “Oakland internet marketing services” and “Berkeley internet marketing services” and so on. These keyword phrases are also included in the page’s URL as well as the title tag, page description, ALT tags and body text.

These precision-optimized pages each rank nicely for the phrases they target. Think about it. If someone was searching for the phrase “Berkeley internet marketing services,” my website would offer an exact match, at least in terms of the page title and URL.

The thing to remember is that Google slices and dices internet content. It doesn’t distinguish between your homepage and all the other pages on your website. If one particular page buried deep in your website is the best match for the keywords being searched for, that’s the page that comes up.

The pages described above are precision-optimized for one particular keyword phrase and I have 67 of them, each targeting a slightly different phrase. The idea is to provide the search engines with a perfect destination page for someone searching for that particular keyword phrase.

I did this for a past client with a hauling and garbage removal business. I built the site on WordPress and created 27 surrogate homepages, each precision-targeting a different local city. His site is now a PageRank 4 (see Chapter 30 for a definition) and ranks on the first page of Google for over 100 relevant keyword phrases. More than half of his business comes from his website.

This boils down to an understanding of how search engines work. People who find your website through a search engine may or may not land on your actual homepage first. For that reason, you should build your entire site such that each page could act as a homepage if necessary.

Build pages that cater to specific keyword phrases. If you know a keyword phrase that’s searched for frequently (see Chapter 13), build a page all about that phrase. Build an entire section about it! Give the search engines a reason to direct their users to your website.

Make sure these precision-optimized pages are well integrated into your website with plenty of links leading from other content-packed pages to these precision-optimized pages. Google looks at the internal link structure of a website almost as much as it looks at the external link structure.

Most websites are full of links like “click here” and “read more.” That tells Google that the website is about “click here” and “read more” but that’s not true. The website isn’t about “click here.” It’s about your business. So put the links on your primary keywords, not useless words like “click here.” Then point those links at your precision-optimized surrogate homepages.

This “internal links” (links coming from within the same website) are still considered endorsements of the target page, and they will improve their ranking as a result. Cross-link all the pages on your website with descriptive text links. It brings the information closer together and the search engines love that.

Author Bio: Patrick is the author of \”Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed\” (2011, Wiley) and a regular speaker for Bloomberg TV. Watch his video about SEO surrogate homepages on YouTube.

Category: Business
Keywords: patrick,schwerdtfeger,seo,surrogate,homepage