Home Page Ranking and Optimization

Q: For search engine marketing, should I optimize every page of my site so my home page achieves a high ranking? Do I need to optimize the 100+ pages that require a username and password?

A: To achieve rankings on desired pages - particularly the home page, you do not need to optimize all pages of a site. In fact, it is better to have a few highly optimized pages than many pages with mediocre or no optimization whatsoever.

There are many factors that drive the rankings within organic search results - including page content, meta instructions, external links to your site, etc.

Focusing upon and providing valuable content is the best starting place. In fact, it is the only long term strategy that will prove effective over time given search engine algorithms change - altering the importance upon backlinks, meta tags and the like.

One point you should consider is directing the search engines away from pages that require username/passwords. This can be easily accomplished using a robot.txt file or including:

< meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive" / > in the username/password protected pages.