: Blog: Search results prefer index page over content pages I have a typical blog that has recent posts on the main page, and each post's title links to a page that only shows that one article

@Voss4911412

I was looking through some of the keywords used to get to my site and I was noticing that some of the searches would only show my main page, and not the page for the article


Wouldn't this be because those keywords (plural!) are matching multiple words that only exist not in the article, but in the main page?


Is there some way that I can tell search engines to rank the content page higher than my index page?


Not really; from the search engine's perspective, the home page is a better match to the user's keywords. Presumably unless the keywords are utterly generic, the user may find something of interest for at least some of the keywords on your main page.

The alternative is not to match at all, or to better tailor your articles to include a broader selection of relevant words that people might be searching on.

(Do not, of course, go adding random words to your articles as that would be kind of evil -- I am not recommending that, just exploring the world of synonyms a bit.)

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@Chiappetta492

I would first not display all of the text on the main blog page, although some readers don't like this, so take that into consideration.

Secondly, I would make sure that your tags and categories don't display on the main page but do on the inner pages. (Your keywords are in your tags, right). This should increase the keyword density of the inner pages.

Another suggestion is to get one of those plugins that show related posts. This can increase the onsite backlinks to the blog entries.

Lastly, make sure that you are getting backlinks to your entries. You can use Hootsuite to post links to them on various social media sites and you can auto import your entries into Digg.

Those ideas should at least help.

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