Homepage On-page Optimization

[KempRugeLawGroup]

How do you all handle homepage optimization, if you (or a client) offers a variety of services? Our homepage has the strongest link profile of any of our pages, but it lists all the areas of law we cover. Therefore, it has too many keywords and none really rank well. Should we just pick our most profitable areas and optimize for that?

www.kempruge.com in case anyone would benefit from looking at the actual page.

Thanks,

Ruben

[Jonathan1979]

Whenever I do optmisation for clients, I "brand out" the homepage and design it for maximum conversion.  I then use individual pages for keyword optimisation.  If you overly optimize the homepage for keywords it can look spammy.

Whilst this should be taken as a general comment, I have seen good rankings for keyword pages, even when the majority of backlinks are targeting the homepage with the branded anchor text.

[fazza47]

I would go with the brand name of the website as well.  Just ensure you have great navigation to filter any strength through to the more targeted pages and start producing content on these that is linkable also.

[DennisSeymour]

definitely go with long tail branding on the front page. I would create a specialty page for the specific service to "further elaborate" on what we do and what they get or something like that. You homepage will give those pages a boost and you can even get 2 pages to show up.

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Ruben

I fall along the lines of the other suggestions. Your homepage should get the most links, but the link value will pass through to the inner pages. Definitely optimize (on-site) the homepage for the brand as well as (in my opinion) the most broad keyword - like "Florida Attorneys" - not that you would rank for that per se (or obsess about ranking for it), but it's just good architecture telling Google the topic/category of the entire site, as well as telling the user an all encompassing phrase of what the company is.

Now, the title tag is currently wayyy too long, as I'm sure you know. Something like "Kemp & Ruge Law Group - Florida Attorneys" would work just fine.

-Dan

[CHarkins]

A couple of things that I see on the home page:

The title tag is a bit long. Google will end up rewriting the title for the search query to make it match up with the searcher's question/intent but you're putting a lot on Google. Instead I would redo the title and meta description to read more like the best converting adwords ads that you've been running - or at least to be more brand-heavy.

The home page should be more brand-centric and push the link equity to the inner pages. The header tags should also be structured so that the most important tags for site structure are H1, then H2, etc.

I noticed that your H2 tags are "Contact Us" and "Latest News" - not really anything unique to this page and not the search topics you want to be ranked for. The main topics (Family Law, etc) are all "H3" tags. I'd redo the styling to bump those up to H2's and demote "contact us" and "latest news" to something else.

Lastly, all of the blog posts in "latest news" are only linked with "Read More" as the anchor text. I would change that to be linked by the title to have more relevancy passed on to the sub-pages.

[KempRugeLawGroup]

Craig and Dan,

Thanks so much for the specific suggestions. I put this thread on the back burner, and just now noticed it had new responses. I wish I had checked it earlier, but thanks a lot. This info is really helpful.

• Ruben