Internal Pages outranking homepage in SERPs

[ukss1984]

First of all I would like to stress that this relates to a new site which is just a few weeks old, however it is something that has regularly happened to a lot of our websites in the past, so I am wondering if there is some underlying problem.

We have recently setup the domain www.calcioitaliashop.com. The domain name itself "calcio italia shop" is actually one of the main keywords we are targeting.

However, when we enter this into google (we are using .co.uk version), a lot of the category pages appear, yet the root domain does not.

Does this indicate some coding problem with the website?  I thought we might have some robots problem, but running a site://www.calcioitaliashop.com command shows that the homepage is in the index, so I am just wondering what could be causing these results?

[Alex-Harford]

You need to show Google why the homepage is most important for that term. I haven't looked in depth, but here are a couple of things...

Has Google added your brand name to the title tag here on the SERPs? "Store info : Football Shirts, Kits & Maglia - Calcio Italia Shop_" - _www.calcioitaliashop.com/store_info.htm

I notice it's not the same within your coded title tag. If you've recently removed the brand from your About Us page that could help. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

I haven't checked your link profile but is it possible there are more links (or more powerful links) to your About Us page, rather than your home page? If so, getting this reversed will help, or as it's a new site, perhaps this hasn't happened yet. Setting up profiles with social networks and adding the link to your homepage will help show Google that that is the most important page. You could also create a Google Places profile with a link to the homepage, if you haven't already. Bolding "Calcio Italia Shop" on your About Us makes it look like that page is important for that term. You could remove that bolding or change it to "Calcio Italia Store" (there seems to be some confusion over what your brand name is?) and add "Calcio Italia Shop" to a H1 tag on your homepage.

These little things will help send the right signals, but I don't think it's something you need to worry about long-term - I think Google will eventually figure out the homepage is best to rank for the brand name as that should naturally build up more page authority.

Also, I'd make it readable and put your brand name in the meta description of your homepage. The meta description isn't there to stuff keywords into, it's there to encourage people to click through from the SERPs. It should be around 155 characters max, the search engines chop more off.