Chapter 31
SEO: Surrogate Homepages
How many homepages does your website have?
The conventional wisdom that your website has one homepage is not necessarily true. You can have multiple pages on your website that act like homepages. In fact, you can design dozens of pages that look like homepages but are actually buried somewhere on your website and are precision-optimized for a particular keyword phrase. My Tactical Execution website has 68 homepages. One is my actual homepage but there are 67 others that target various keyword phrases. I call them “surrogate homepages.” Each one looks similar to my actual homepage. Depending on what you search for, Google lists the most appropriate one.
Google has no inherent preference for a website's actual homepage. It looks at all pages equally and delivers the pages best suited to the search query. When someone searches for a particular phrase and Google delivers one of my surrogate homepages among the search results, the searcher doesn't care if it's my actual homepage or not. The important thing is that the searcher finds the information he or she is looking for.
Obviously, my primary homepage is: www.tacticalexecution.com.
The other 67 homepages each target a different geographic location along with the phrase “Internet marketing services.” For example, I target San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and a variety of other municipalities in California's Bay Area, each with the same phrase. One such page can be found at the following URL:
