How important are internal pages to overall site rank?

[omg_jlsa]

This seems like it should be an easy question (and probably is), but it has stumped a few of us over the past few days. Here's the scenario:

We have a site that we are trying to optimize to rank well for a set of keywords. We have a lot of internal pages that are important to users when they visit the site (case studies, for example), but they aren't the pages that we want people to find when they search for our primary keywords.

Our question is, is it valuable to optimize those internal pages for our keywords? In other words, will having a lot of internal pages that mention our keywords affect how well our overall site ranks for those keywords? Or, is it only important to have one "hero" page for our important keywords?

Thanks!

[KrisRoadruck]

Important to have a hero page (or 2) otherwise you risk keyword cannibalization. The short and dirty way to handle this of course is to make sure that any page that is basically on topic with your hero page but isn't the hero page links back to the hero page with the appropriate anchor somewhere in the editorial body. There are other more elegant ways to handle this but this way will get you into less trouble than, for example, rel-canoning all those topically relevant non-hero pages to the hero page (bad idea dont do it).

[CMC-SD]

If a page isn't intended to be a major landing page from organic search, there's no need to optimize it for your target keywords. When you write naturally, you'll use the keywords from time to time anyway.

That said, don't underestimate the long-tail power of pages like this. A case study about widgets in a five-star hotel could be optimized to catch people who are searching for things like "what are the best widgets for five-star hotels" or "using widgets in top hotels," that kind of thing. Write naturally, but make sure the writer ponders the various things that someone looking for that information might type into a search engine, and varies their wording accordingly.

[omg_jlsa]

So, if someone searches for a keyword and we happen to have a hero page optimized for that keyword, how will we measure against another site with a similarly-optimized hero page that ALSO has a lot of topically relevant pages? In other words, does Google take the whole site into account, or does it only return based on the strength of your one hero page?

[omg_jlsa]

If possible, I'd like to ask you the same question I just asked Kris. (We're new to this community, so I apologize if this is poor form).

So, if someone searches for a keyword and we happen to have a hero page optimized for that keyword, how will we measure against another site with a similarly-optimized hero page that ALSO has a lot of topically relevant pages? In other words, does Google take the whole site into account, or does it only return based on the strength of your one hero page?

[CMC-SD]

I'm actually not sure if the algorithm considers all the content on the domain when assessing the relevance of a particular page. But it sounds like you WILL have a lot of topically relevant pages, no? Your site is about widgets; you have a couple of pages that are optimized for big terms like "buy widgets," "women's widgets," etc.; then you have lots of other pages that will still mention widgets in some capacity, right? It's not like you have a travel booking website and now you're trying to optimize one page for viagra?