Kalena,
I am a former student and I have a good question: Suppose I have a landing page for ‘pick a keyword’? Obviously I want the customer to land on this page but this page does not have any pagerank yet. The homepage however does have pagerank and the search results in showing the homepage. How do I get the landing page to out rank the homepage for the specific term?
Respectfully, Cliff
Hi Cliff,
This question really comes back to the fundamentals of SEO, so provides a good opportunity to review some of the basics.
Often a websites Home Page will outrank it’s other, more targeted pages, even though they have more content relevant to the search query, but why is this the case? The answer is usually quite simple, and it mostly comes down to backlinks. More often than not a websites home page has significantly more links to it from external sites, than other pages on the site. Search engines treat backlinks as “votes of confidence” and use anchor text associated with those links as a strong signal about what the site is about.
So, to answer you question – How do I get a landing page to out rank my homepage? – get back to the basics :
- Ensure that the contents of the landing page is highly relevant to and includes plenty of mentions of your targeted keywords
- Optimise Page Title, description, H tags for your keyword
- Establish links to the landing page (not your sites home page), from related third party sites with you keyword phrases as anchor text.
Hope that helps…
Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO Consulting (Brisbane, Australia)