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The most important page on your Web site

Posted by Michael Martinez on October 25, 2007 in SEO Theory

If you had to pick one page on your site that anyone could ever see again, what would it be? I don’t think most people would choose their sites’ root URLs. Maybe some folks would, but I for one would not — not for all of my sites.

My root URLs are gateways or portals to the deeper content on my sites. They tell people what to look for on the site, or what is newest and most interesting on the site. But the meat of my Web sites is not really posted on the root URL.

Many Web site operators nonetheless seek links to their home pages, or promote their home pages. Some companies will only promote their domain names in advertising and product packaging. But some other companies choose to promote deep links (like customer support and product catalogues) on their advertising and packaging.

Some Web sites create special promotion pages and they place those URLs in marketing literature, advertising, and press releases. Some mass marketing letters also include special tracking URLs rather than the root URL.

The value of promoting deep content is pretty thoroughly understood among companies that have robust marketing plans, but the scramble for search results visibility tends to lead Web site operators to focus almost solely on promoting their root URL. They want high Toolbar PageRank or maybe they struggle to achieve a high placement for their service query.

By focusing all your link promotion on one URL you sacrifice a rich depth in link anchor text resources. Those resources, if they deep-linked to your immediately useful content, would help drive converting traffic and build out your own site’s ability to cross-promote itself.

Furthermore, you’d offer a more natural selection of content to attract those deep links, and your root URL would not be the most important page on your site.

Another way to ask the question is, what if every page on your site were as important as your root URL? Or, what if every page on your ste was a root URL, an isolated, independent Web site.

Suppose your only Web presence consisted of profile pages on social media sites and Web forums, where you literally have only one page of content for yourself. How would you string together 200 profiles to give people the impression that they were looking at a 200-page site?

Which profile page would be the most important one? Why?

In the old days, when everyone was dependent upon doorway pages, Altavista slammed millions of doorways into the wall in an event dubbed Black Monday. It was in October 1999, as I recall. I had only just completed my first year of learning about search engine optimization. Suddenly, people I had never heard of started showing up in the only SEO forum around, asking what had happened.

It was the first of several Great Awakenings to rock the search engine optimization industry. Maybe what Google has done this month is another Great Awakening. I don’t know, yet. I haven’t really been affected by all this Toolbar hoopla.

But people who had been dependent upon doorway pages suddenly had to find a new way to promote their sites. They began looking soon afterward into the concept of Content-Rich Doorway pages, which were robuts, attractive pages that participated in on-site navigation. They were not as easy to optimize as regular, bland, barren, ugly doorway pages but they worked pretty well and search engines accepted them.

Nowadays we call such pages “landing pages” and they are used mostly for pay-per-click advertising. In fact, many sites block robots from crawling their landing pages. But the principle of designing every page on a Web site to act like a doorway has fallen out of popularity. I think it’s still there, buried amid the clutter of SEO tactics and tools. It’s just not as pristine and compelling as it once was.

Every page on your site should provide some value, maybe not to everyone who visits your site but at least to someone. You should be able to express that value in some way without feeling or acting ashamed.

You subtly, unconsciously place value on your own pages when you don’t think about how you regard them. You design a site and you instinctively place value according to your gut instinct.

In many cases, people just need to adjust their gut instincts. For example, earlier today I looked at a blog where someone was complaining that his site didn’t rank first for his company’s very unusual name. When I looked at his root URL I only found the word in the title, and alt= attribute, and in a link pointing back to the root URL. In other words, the guy had placed so little value on the name of his site he didn’t even bother to mention it clearly and distinctly on his front page. He didn’t emphasize how important that name is to him in his copy.

I have no doubt he was relying on link anchor text to tell people how important his company name is.

I have a very strong feeling that a lot of his inbound links were not very good links.

I may be wrong about the guy’s backlinks, but I know you’ll find my root URLs for the keywords I want you to find them listed under. I don’t depend on link anchor text to do my search engine optimization for me.

Why? Because every page on my site is important to me. I make sure the pages will be found for something — something relevant to their topics.

That’s what search engine optimization is all about, in my opinion.