Question about optimising an inner pages apposed to the homepage

[RoyalBlueCoffee]

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently looking to optimise the inner page of a website opposed to the homepage itself. I was wondering if I should stick to some kind of link distribution?

For instance, say my website is about widgets and the url is http://www.widgets.com, I want to optimise for a much easier "blue widgets" term on an inner page with the url: http://www.widgets.com/blue-widgets.

Does google discriminate against a website with a higher number of links pointing to an inner page than the homepage? If so, what would you recommend a safe distribution between the two?

Your thoughts would be greatly appreciated,

Peter.

[IM_Learner]

Hi Peter,

It's better to have separate pages for blue widgets, red widgets etc. As far as backlinks are concerned, ask yourself - if I click this link and land on a page that doesn't answer my question, would it be a good user experience? There is no need to maintain any sort of proportion/distribution of links between the Home page and inner pages. Often, you may not get a chance to link the inner page. In that case you may vary the anchor text.

-Shailendra

[Cyrus-Shepard]

It's very common for an internal page to be more popular than the homepage, and there is no known penalty or discrimination in such a case.

[MonicaOConnor]

The concept of optimizing the internal page for Blue Widgets should be the same as your home page. It should contain relevant links and on page optimization focusing on your keyterm. In this case, blue widgets. You would want to make sure that you use this term in your meta title, description, in the URL and include relevant content as well. The links are only half of the equation. Having a ton of links and no relevant content will be what gets you in trouble with the engines. As long as you have a balance of links and on page content you should be ok.