Our Recent Blog Posts

Recently, at the Webmaster Hangout, the webmaster trends analyst, John Mueller provide the tips about how to fix your Home Page ranking for the keyword phrase when your inner page is the main priority.

On The Signals That Indicate Your Webpage Requires Ranking Over Home Page–

John Mueller said that-

“You said Google’s algorithm doesn’t automatically favor the homepage ranking above other pages. What should we do to let Google know that a blog post for example should be ranking for a certain page term rather than the home page.

If we have a small website, how do we present clear signals to show Google that this blog post is the better page for certain search terms even though the home page probably has most internal links pointing to it?”

It is the issue when the Home Page outranks an inner page for particular search terms. Though it a strange problem as the Home page, mainly on the blog site will feature a limited amount of contents taken from the inner pages.

The Power of the Custom Content Extraction

However, the person who is asking the question about how much the content from the inner pages will be shown in the Home Page, it is that the article extract that is being used on the Home page of the website is taken from the article and too much of extraction is being done. Unless the custom extraction is done, most of the themes will display the first few lines from the article or the whole article on the Home Page. However, this setting you can control in the WordPress CMS. According to John Mueller, it is better to create a unique content extract that will describe the article in short. Thus, it will encourage the visitor to click the page to have a glance to the contents.  The article excerpt will be done in the way a Meta description is made (it might include the Call of Action), and you can also use the excerpt as the Meta Des if you like the content. The role played by the custom excerpt is as same as the Meta Description of the page.

John Mueller Explains how to rank the Inner page

John Mueller provides the suggestion on how to rank your inner page in place of the Home Page-

“The best thing that you can do in a case like this is to make sure that you have that content covered well on those blog posts and maybe have it a little bit clearer on the home page that this page is not about that content.”

Generally, the Home Page should be ranked for a particular keyword phrase. If you are doing so, this indicates that the Home Page lacks in the main focus. As per the advice of John Mueller, in the case of the Home page, it must be optimized for what the entire website is all about. For example, if your website is about the widgets, the Home Page should be optimized in such a manner that it indicates that it sells all types of widgets. If the site is all about a local business as like a local Restaurant, then the site should mention it. And the inner pages should have the menu lists.

John Mueller Describes On How Internal Linking Helps In Page Ranking

The renowned webmaster trends analyst explains some of the best ways for linking the internal anchor text for helping in the webpage ranking. Anchor texts are the words that are used to link one page to another. He said that-

“You mentioned internal linking, that’s important. The context we pick up from internal linking is really important to us… with that kind of the anchor text, that text around the links that you’re giving to those blog posts within your content. That’s important to us.”

This means you can use the non-descriptive words as like the “more info” and the “read more”. It is better to use the meaningful anchor text that describes the content about. Then, John Mueller also describes the standard SEO rules on titles and headings-

“Additionally, of course, the content, like I mentioned is really important. So, making sure you have clear titles on those pages, you use clear headings, you could structure content in an easily readable way that is clear that this is about this topic without… resorting to keyword stuffing.

…be reasonable about… putting keywords on your pages. Write your pages in a way that they would work well for users rather than in a way that you think search engines might pick that up.”

What Can You Know About The External Links?

Google is all about ranking some of the specific pages for the search queries. The search queries that indicate the size and the color that tends to return the product pages that show color and size. Google prefers to rank pages for the given phrases, not for the Home Pages.

If the Home Page is getting ranks in the search engines rather than the inner pages, then it might indicate that the sites do not have enough useful links all total and the majority of the inks tend to go to the Home Page rather than going to the inner pages. As per John Mueller, the weak link profile can work for the internal pages to rank higher. But, if you use the proper excerpts, focusing on the contents of the Home Page and the site architecture can overcome the disadvantage of getting from the weak link profiles.