Treat Every Page Like It's Your Homepage!
by Dave Maloney
It doesn't seem that long ago that the "world wide web" was this new cool gadget, and soon after businesses started advertising in their newspaper ads and on the sides of their fleet trucks: "Visit Our Homepage on the World Wide Web at http://www..." At that time, websites were just a home page and maybe a couple other pages that were there to tell the world about your company, who you are and what you do. The web has evolved quite a bit, as well as the way we use it, and the structure of your site needs to adapt.
We used to just send everyone to our homepage. Our homepage was considered the "front door" or main entrance of the electronic version of our company, and every visitor to the site funneled in through the home page front door (usually titled "Welcome"). Once on the home page, visitors could decide which pages they wanted to visit from there. And because we had so much to offer and were afraid someone might not find what they're looking for on our home page, the page grew to be a 1/4 mile long scrolling nightmare.
It doesn't have to (and shouldn't) be that way. Your home page is still a front door to your site, but so is every other page you have. People will search for a specific product or service in Google, Bing, etc., and if you've done a good job at search engine optimization your specific page for that product or service will show up in the results. They can visit your site by directly coming to that page and skip your homepage altogether. That means every page should be optimized around a different keyword phrase to be found for. Every page is another chance to get your company found and is another entrance to your site. So basically, any and every page is (kind of) a homepage.
So you might worry that if someone finds you for one particular service and lands on that specific page, they may not be able to see what other services you offer. With that in mind, check out your page navigation and make sure everything is organized for new visitors to easily navigate through your site without getting lost. Keep the same nav on every page throughout the site with no dead-ends. Link to other pages or blog posts within your site if you think they would be of interest and relevant to the page they're currently on. Also, keep in mind, if they were searching for a specific topic, they've already found it and may not be interested in every other thing you do or have to offer. If they're ready, make sure it's clear to them what you want them to do next: entice them with a call to action, fill out a form to contact for more info, etc.
People will still find you homepage first, and you still want it to rank for something, but it's just a single page on your site. You don't want to have only one page showing up in Google when all your pages can. Every page on your site is a new opportunity for your site to be found and should be optimized uniquely from all your others. Keep in mind too in your link building strategy, that not every inbound link has to go to the home page. Be direct, your website traffic appreciates skipping the extra clicks and Google rewards your pages with higher rankings.
(And, by the way, you don't need to say "Visit Our Website at..." anymore before displaying your website; if it ends with .com, .net.whatever, everyone knows what it is.)
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