Introduction
In this post, I'm going to discuss an SEO mistake that will severely hold back your earnings and your Google rankings, and once you make this mistake, it's really hard to back out of it. You pretty much need to live with it. My name is Praveen, and I've made a ton of Errors over the years when it comes to ranking websites through my various SEO. Companies - and this particular issue has cost me thousands of dollars.
Do not rate your homepage
The problem is when you try to rank your website's home page. What do I mean by that I mean when you actually do keyword, research and optimize your homepage for keywords you want to rank for so, for example, if you were trying to make a website in the golfing Niche, I'm saying do not absolutely do not try to Optimize, your home page for anything whatsoever. I'Ve actually made this mistake before in the ketogenic diet, Niche, and tried ranking the homepage for keywords like best ketogenic supplement and it worked. We rank number one for it, but still like I said before it cost me.
Thousands and thousands of dollars and in this Post I'll explain why what you want to do is keep your home page like a portal. Your homepage should just be a welcome map for new visitors, whose goal is to convey trust and get people to various pieces of content on your website, and it's not just me that thinks this thing about every single major website on the internet.
Do you think Nerdwallet's homepage ranks for anything like personal finance? The answer is, no, it only ranks for brand terms like nerd wallet. Does Victoria's Secret homepage rank for lingerie again? No, it's all brand terms once again, so follow the advice of an Internet, marketer, personal finance, blog, and pantry dealer and reframe from optimizing your home page for anything. But your brand now there's one rare exception to this, of course, and I'll get to that later.
But it's rare AF so right now, what I'm going to do is give you four reasons why it's straight-up stupid to rank your homepage, and, in the end, I'll give you my game, changer tips on how to actually design your homepage for maximum benefit. But before I do that, can you please maximize the like button by pressing it until it turns blue in order for the like button to provide maximum benefit to my channel? It needs to be optimized as well, but in all seriousness, it helps me out a ton. So I'd super appreciate it. If you smashed it.
Keep your alternatives open
The first reason you shouldn't rank your homepage is that it limits you and prevents you from expanding into other niches. Let's say you decide to get into the Home Improvement Niche, but you got stoned one day and thought it'd be a good idea to rank your homepage, for a keyword like best table saw well, that's all fun and dandy and I'm sure you'll have an easy time.
Ranking for that keyword since you're targeting it on your home page, but what happens when you want to Branch into belt Sanders? Would a website visitor even thinks it's a possibility that your table saw site is going to have guides on Belt Sanders? Whatever you put on your home page is basically like your storefront. If you sold Pizza, you wouldn't decorate your storefront like an ice cream shop. Would you, of course, you wouldn't on most websites?
The most highly visited page is the home page. You want to be able to direct all that excess traffic to the important pages on your site, and the best way to do that is to configure your page like a portal that showcases all the most popular different types of content. You have on your site and displaying a variety of content. Options are the key.
Interlink to establish topical relevance
The second reason ranking your homepage is a bad idea is that it's going to severely mess up your ability to implement one of the most important SEO tactics. There is, and that's interlinking, to establish topical relevance. Let me illustrate what topical relevance is through an example. Let's say you have an outdoor sports site that has written 100 articles on surfing and Google ranking for anything you want to regarding the sport. But one day you decide: okay, let's Branch into scuba diving. So you write an absolutely freaking perfect article about scuba, diving, and guess what doesn't rank? Why is that? Does Google think that? Just because you wrote a single article on scuba diving, it doesn't mean you're an expert in it.
They want you to write a bunch of articles on scuba, covering a variety of topics, and then Interlink them together, so they refer to each other as references creating quality, relevant articles and interlinking them together to make you a topical Authority on a subject. People have all these crazy rules on interlinking and deciding whether or not you should link two pages together, but to simplify, I like to use two straightforward rules to link to Pages. You want to rank and link to pages that are relevant. Here's the problem with ranking your homepage and how it relates to interlinking. If you make your homepage about surfing, you can't link to your scuba page from it and that's because of rule number two.
These pages are not relevant to each other. Your homepage is the most valuable page on the internet to get a link from why? Because it typically has more incoming external links than any other page on your site. You want to keep your options open, real, quick. I want to give a shout-out to the sponsor of today's Post and that's Search Console. Ranking Search Console ranking is a top-notch SEO platform jam-packed with over 30 powerful tools that make life a breeze for SEO and digital marketers alike.
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Make link-building easier
Third reason you shouldn't rank. Your homepage is because it makes Outreach and link building more difficult. Let's say you own a home improvement site and someone sends you an Outreach email asking for a backlink to their site. You being a responsible website owner, decide to check out that site, asking for a link which side are you more likely to link to this site? Who monetizes their homepage to run for best table saws or this site?
That is pretty much the exact same type of site, but it just looks a billion times more trustworthy because of the design of its homepage. When people are trying to decide if they trust a site or not, they look to its home page, you want to take advantage of any opportunity you can to convey trust here and unfortunately, that's nearly impossible to do when your homepage is super monetized and optimized.
Make your site easier to sell
reason number four you shouldn't rank your homepage because it makes your site much more difficult to sell. This relates back to reason, number one, your limited expandability into other niches in the event that you should ever decide to sell your website, bear in mind, there are two main factors that buyers look at when evaluating whether they want to buy your business or not. The first is a risk, but the second is the upside: if you've, hamstrung your expandability by putting Niche content on your homepage, buyers are going to recognize that and not pay as much for your business.
Now, as mentioned before, there's a rare exception when you want to rank your home page when you, Google, your main keyword and there's a bunch of websites on page one ranking their home page, then you want to do the same thing like here with the keyword Landscaping. La Jolla, most of the time this comes up in local SEO where people are ranking service websites for local cities like here again for t-shirt printing in Sydney. But it also happens from time to time in other niches like here, for the keyword, personal finance, and app.
Where you see mint.com and budget Bakers ranking their homepage, but these are exceptions rather than the rule. One more exception is when the home page ranks for the brand terms, as my homepage does for terms like Praveen, and Praveen marketing, but that's a side effect of portal design, not the main goal of it. Okay, so we talked a lot about it. Why ranking your homepage is a bad idea We talked a lot about this portal concept and how it's Superior, let's get into the Nitty Gritty on how to design a proper portal page.
How to Create an Excellent Homepage
The first goal of the home page is to establish credibility for the reader. You want to be able to ensure the reader that they've landed on a trustworthy internet destination. Trust me to do this above the fold. You could do something like I've done here, making it featured in the strip that highlights some of the biggest Publications your site has been on. I also like what Spruce has done here with this bar showing off their annual reader count projects and topic coverage. Their design and branding also do a lot to convey trust, Tim, Ferriss's blog also does a similar thing here too, and talk about full circle.
He's the first person I've ever heard about this concept of credibility. Indicators from other things you can do on the homepage to establish credibility, include a custom logo, a high-quality hero image, a nice looking theme and color scheme, clever navigation bar links like a jobs page, which definitely makes you look more legit, and this applies to affiliate Sites but a section on your product review process and standards goes a long way to show that you're, not a rinky-dink affiliate site in the second goal of your homepage, is to get them to click, something anything you want to get them off your home page And onto another page on your site, the longer people stay on your website navigate around it, the better signal it gives to Google that your website is good and to facilitate this, you need to present your homepage like a menu at a five-star restaurant, except in this case, it's okay to show pictures.
Let's take a look at this homepage template from a case study of mine called project cash flow up here at the top. I have big graphical buttons that will lead people to the wide categories that my website covers. For example, if I have a site about technology here, you'd see navigation buttons to my laptop category Pages or gaming equipment down below. We have a featured post section. The articles that are placed here are all hand selected based on two different criteria. First, I'm looking for articles that are super popular on my site that people love to visit, load up analytics, and look at your behavior, then site content view to see which pages are visited the most. These are prime candidates for your featured post section.
The other criteria I'm looking for are articles that are super important for me to rank. I touched upon this before, but getting a link from your home page to an internal article gives a huge SEO boost to that article. Think of it like this most of the time, your homepage gets more external links than any other page on your site. In my case, nearly 50 of my backlinks from other websites are going to my home page. That's 1200 votes from other websites telling Google that my site is awesome. The problem is they're all going to my home page.
The way to spread that love is to internally link from your home page. Getting a homepage link also helps to create relevance for the receiving page. Google uses NLP algorithms to determine which topic of website covers. In my case, dignitymarketing.com is about SEO websites, business, and marketing. How do I know that? Well, you can use tools like links that leverage Google's NLP API to figure it out, and you can see right here.
Conclusion
Those same topics are coming up straight from Google's own API, so when one of my pages gets a link from my home page that lets Google know that this page is on topic for my site and it gets a head start in its own journey of being Relevant for a specific query, how do you know which Pages you want to give this precious love to look at which Pages you have that Target keywords with the high search volume but, most importantly, look for Pages which have the potential to make you the most money.
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