Many people foam at the mouth when asking that their homepage be the focus for search engine optimization and visibility in the search engines.

That’s cool. We’ll listen. But soon, young grasshopper, we’ll have to speak at length on why optimizing your interior pages is just as important.

For the sake of this post, though, let’s take two very important reasons that are best understood by our clients and should be by you too.

Reason #1

Each page of your website should be considered a ‘doorway’ to your site. Each page is (should be) a topic onto itself, but related to the overall theme of your website.

It should be optimized for those visitors looking specifically for that particular subtopic.

Then, based on design, content strategy and usability, your site should could lead your visitors to navigate further into your website.

A side note: Trying to optimize or have your SEO optimize the homepage for a long list of keywords is going to lead to frustration. Let’s keep it at 2-3 keywords or phrases per page, please and thank you.

Reason # 2

If the major search engines see that most of your inbound links point only to the homepage (even if you’re peppering the interior with fresh content), you’re going to risk a low authority score and/or a low trust score.

Authority and trust are a big thing with the search engines. Keep in mind that search results are meant to be as valuable as possible to the search engine user, so those results are going to be mainly based on relevance, authority and trust.

Pointing valued links and traffic to your interior pages helps tell the search engines that you’re serious about your site, that your site is well regarded from homepage to interior, that your content within the site is valued. This helps build authority and trust with search engines in regard to your relevance to a topic/keyword/phrase.

Without pointing links or paying attention to the interior page is allowing your site to get stale.

Somewhat of an analogy:

Think about it like as brick and mortar establishment, for argument’s sake. If the front counter is looking great but your aisles of merchandise are largely ignored (by you and your customers), your customers are going to question your ‘authority’ as the best resource for whatever it is you’re selling. Then, they might head to a competitor who is paying attention to the whole store and not just the front counter.