Ranking the homepage - not the article pages?

[crazihos]

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Hi all,

I'm hoping for some advice here in my first real crack at seo.

I've had a lead generation site for years working with pcc but I recently added wpress so that I can add articles and try my hand at seo.

The thing is I ideally want the homepage to rank well in the serps and not the article pages so much.

Is there a way to do this or do I just link to the homepage from all of the articles I write and hope that people follow the links when they visit and fill in my form from there?

Cheers

Russ

[ChristopherB]

Have you looked into adding your form below every article? meaning theres a form on all article pages.

You could do this or simply link to the form page via that articles like you've mentioned.

You won't be able to get teh same rank for your article keywords on your homepage simply because a new page can target a whole new subject and you can provide users to this page with the exact solution they need.

ie. an article on debt management would bring in people who need to sort out their debt

an article on mortgage lenders would bring in people looking for a mortgage,

Two completely different mindsets looking for totally different things sending them all to your one homepage is going to equal less conversions.

[Bud]

Do you use sitemaps?

If so there is a field where you can give a 'weight' to each page, highlighting their level of priority to the search engines.

See: Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator

[crazihos]

Thanks ChristopherB and Bud,

The form is on every page so I should get some leads that way but the problem is loads of text just doesnt do as good a sales job my homepage does.

What i'm looking for is to use the articles to boost the rank of my homepage for key words if thats possible.

I've not used sitemaps but I will check it out now - is that what that will let me do then, use the content to add weight to my homepage so that visitors see that and then have to find the article from there?

[Simon_T]

Hi Russ,

I think that you're saying that you want as many people as possible to visit your home page. My advice would be to use the Google Keyword Tool to research the most relevant and realistic, high volume keyword that you could have a shot at ranking for. Take a look at the number and quality of external backlinks that your competitors have for the desired keywords - you can use 'SEO for Firefox' download as one tool to view this within the SERPs. After you've selected the best keyword(s) to target on your homepage, then it's of course all about how quickly you can build up both the number and quality of external links to challenge your competitors on the 1st page of Google.

As a second point, to boost your deeper pages' rankings, I would suggest looking at your site hierarchy, e.g. your homepage may target 'debt management', which if ranked well would pass link popularity down to a page targeting the less competitive term 'debt management help.'

Regarding users already visiting your article pages, all I can think of is a clear call to action that would send them to your home page. Having said that, I think it's important to consider the fact that your visitiors arriving via natural search results may have very different intentions to users visiting from PPC, i.e. they may be in more of a research mode and thus may want to view specific content.

Hope this helps in some way.

[amisuggests]

I am not sure i correctly understand the question
Sounds like you want only your homepage to rank and not your article pages
Not sure why you would want to do this

Anyway just concentrate on building backlinks to your homepage

Also you could pt a robots file in your html so that your article pages are not crawled by the bots

Again, not sure why you would want to do this

A lot of us are trying to get ALL our pages to rank for some keyword or the other