martinibuster - 7:41 am on Jun 18, 2008 (gmt 0)

Groundswell of links
This is something I've been pondering for awhile now. Instead of thinking of all the phrases you should be ranking for and aiming that to the home page, I've been thinking of building a groundswell of relevancy so that the home page pops up with that superlisting with the extra links to deeper pages. But not just for the sake of the superlisting, but to build a groundswell of inbound-relevancy for all the different parts of whatever niche you're in and the home page is the tip where it all erupts and comes to a head.

Though we need some external links to the home page to support the themes of the next-level pages...

I'm turning that around. We need inbound links to the next-level pages to support the home page. That's the groundswell. Home page is good for what? One word and two word phrases plus the name of your site/product? I'm thinking that it's the other way around, the next-level pages support the home page via the inbound links the next-level pages are receiving.

In terms of AdSense clicks, the home page generally sucks. In terms of conversions, a dedicated next-level page for a multi-topic website is probably a better page for the search engine user to land on. I think that's some of what's happening to people who are losing their rankings in the latest go around.

Where are you driving those links?
I was clicking around and discovered the link network for a prominent SEO yesterday. Geez, I found a half dozen different keyword phrase anchors pointing to the same page. These weren't variations of a phrase, they were different services. Imo, and YMMV etc. the conversion rate for that page is likely getting driven down for lack of focus.

[edited by: martinibuster at 5:08 pm (utc) on June 18, 2008]