Are you making the most of each page? Each page is a landing page in your site that can encourage visitors to take action, delve deeper and evaluate your value proposition or convert into a long-term loyal repeat customers.
Ensuring that each page in your site serves as a landing page or target for a specific range of keywords is what distinguishes your pages from your competition.
Although similarities may exist on the outside (masthead, content, links) it is the internal structure and mechanics beneath the surface that determine if a webmaster has done their homework and applied search engine friendly methods for ensuring long term positioning.
Here are 5 tips that you can put into action immediately such as:
1) Using keyword rich anchor text to links pages (using a keyword in the title, h1, h2 tags, in the content at the beginning, middle and end of the page as well as as the text in a few links contextually in a paragraph) are great starters.
2) Increasing topical relevance. How many supporting pages are there about a subject? one, four, fifteen? things like this matter. Not only how many supporting pages, but how many are interlinked, which one is positioned as the main page, how old each page and the links on them are and where they point. These are the factors that an SEO consultant looks for to determine how to fine-tune content, site architecture and internal and external links.
3) Making sure each page is optimized solely for one keyword (then add a few keyword modifiers) to add more weight to the phrases you are targeting.
4) Ensure that you are linking proportionately to sub folders and sub pages instead of just the home page. Why settle for a strong homepage and weak internal links on your site? Spread the links around and the whole site benefits.
Deep linking also applies from linking from older pages in your site to new pages or vice versa. Your own site (if aged and structured well) can serve as a resource for links that can impact the search engine result pages just as much as links from other sites.
5) Are your pages incorporating a call to action using action words, images and incentives? What is the point of driving traffic if your site does not clearly corral the user to make a decision or take action in some form. Brand loyalty is nice, but sales and conversion are even better.
In the beginning, all pages are created equal, (from zero) which is pure potential. It is the way we populate pages and how they gel cohesively as a collection that makes your site relevant and ultimately determines how effective each landing page is in your site.