How to Use Your Interior Pages Effectively for SEO
June 14th, 2007Many companies concentrate their SEO effort on improving the Google rankings of their homepage. The problem with this strategy is that the home page cannot be all things to all people. It cannot rank well for every keyword that could drive traffic to you, and it might not be relevant to searchers. Remember that most people decide in seconds whether the website they have landed on is right for their purposes; they don’t spend time poking around to find out what other information you have.
To get all off the search engine traffic that you can, you need to think beyond the homepage and use interior pages effectively. You can laser target your interior pages to specific topics that searchers want to read about, instantly convincing them of your site’s relevance and authority. Furthermore, you can attain a high reputation with the search rankings for each individual page; with a good linking system, this reputation can flow between the different pages of your website.
In order to use interior pages effectively, you should:
- Design each page to be accessible and informative to someone who hasn’t seen any other pages of your website.
- Create an easy to use navigation system that encourages visitors to explore your site more thoroughly once they have the information that they came looking for.

Google has made the effort to show webmasters just how useful site maps can be to their search engine spiders. Site maps help to ensure that all relevant pages are properly indexed, while providing extra value to the site visitors by helping them find content more quickly.
Most of the time, SEO focuses on how to get pages into search engine results, and how to position those pages once they have been indexed. But every now and then, you’ll have pages on your website that you want to keep off of the listings. You may even want to keep your entire website from being listed. For example, if you are still building your site, you may want to prevent it from being indexed until it is completed. Or you may want to prevent spiders from indexing pages with sensitive information, or duplicate pages that have been formatted for easy printing.
Matt Cutts, a prolific blogger and an engineer at Google, has asked for feedback that would allow Google to