Search engines rank webpages, not websites.
Think of a reference manual; dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauraus. The title of the book refers to a collection of pages bound together. Unlike a novel, reading each page in order serves no purpose.
A website is composed of webpages. A collection of webpages constitutes a website and as in our manual example, each webpage of a website contains useful information.
Search engines, such as Google, rank individual pages of each site and not the whole site collectively.
Overall, with good SEO, most of your pages will rank well.
The URL or Domain
Think of a website as a place (i.e. your Domain) where webpages of a common theme reside. In this way, you may better understand how a “website” may rank for dozens of keywords. In actuality, a successful website contains many pages allowing for the excellent SERP rankings.
When establishing a PageRank, an overall score is assigned to your domain, or website. A PageRank is different than index rankings on a SERP. It gives you an overall score of the relevance of a website.
Webpages
Each article you write for publish for your site will have a separate and unique URL. The root URL remains the same, but the extension, or filename, is unique to everypage of the site. For instance;
MedicalMarketingEnterprises.com
This points to the home page and is the “root” URL.
MedicalMarketingEnterprises.com/About/Randall.V.Wong
This URL is the address of my “About” page. It is indexed separately from the home page and all other pages on this site. This extension signifies that it is completely separate file, or page, on my site.
Each of these pages is read and indexed separately by Google. One page may rank better for “medical search engine optimization” and the other for “randall wong md.”
This website has almost 300 pages “indexed” with the search engines. In theory, this means this site could rank for at least 300 different keywords or subjects!
Do you have 300 areas of your practice for which you’d like to rank Number 1?
What Can You Do?
This emphasizes the importance of relevance. Each and every article should be relevant to one subject, or keyword. The more specific your article, or post, is to one keyword, the more relevant. Try to write an article “concentrating” on too many keywords and you lose specificity, i.e. relevance.
To your success!
“Randy”
Randall V. Wong, M.D.
Medical Website Optimization
www.MedicalMarketingEnterprises.com