So you have your website set up, you’ve got it technically optimised by an SEO professional and you want to start gaining backlinks and get on social media to get the word out about your business. Naturally you direct most people back to your homepage and no more thought is given. But this is not the way to run things! The homepage isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the only place of value on your website. If you’re an eCommerce store you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of products you’ll want your customers to know about. If you’re a blog, you have hundreds for people to read, if you offers services there is plenty for people to read about on your site. Of course you want these showing in Google and on other sites so simply getting all links to go back to your homepage isn’t ideal.
Internal Links
Whilst an active XML sitemap tells Google about the pages on your site, it’s good to have a healthy internal linking system on your site – i.e. link to all your pages on your site, not just constant links back to your homepage. From an SEO perspective, the value of all your pages increases if you are linking to them on your site. Generally if you have a low number of indexed pages (obviously relative to how many pages you have on your site) this probably indicates that you need more internal links. A great example of a site that does this in a natural way is Mark’s Daily Apple. All his blog posts have several external and internal links on them, all relevant to the subject he is commenting on. Taking a random post of his, the blog post is a lengthy one, containing over 2,000 words and in that text there are over 35 internal links within the blog post content. One of the links is for one of his blogs entitled ‘signs you should eat more carbs’. This phrase in Google brings up over 24 million results in Google – and number 1 is Mark’s Daily Apple blog post on the subject, beating Huffington Post and 24 million others.
External Links
There is the added risk if you have hundreds of links which are all going to your homepage without any pages linking to any other page on your site, that Google may consider it spam (as it seems unnatural) and they may actually penalise your site for it. Having links all over your site boosts your whole websites authority, meaning you rank for a lot more phrases and don’t have to just rely on your homepage.
Blogs
This just raises another instance where a blog is useful for SEO purposes. It gives you the chance to link internally across your site and another area where you can other sites linking to yours. This is only useful of course if you do actually link internally and following Mark’s Daily Apple example, have a 2% internal link density – it seems to be working well for him!