SEO Lesson: Search Engines Rank Pages, not Sites

One of the first lessons I learned may seem obvious to some, but it is very significant for SEO.

Search engines rank individual pages of web sites independently of the other pages on the same site. Each page is ranked in its own right. Search engine don't rank web sites, they rank web pages.

This is one aspect of search engine optimization that most web site publishers don't fully appreciate.

This lesson is significant for a number of reasons. First, it means that your home page -- which is a single web page like any other -- must be optimized by itself, for the intended search kewyords. In other words, it doesn't matter that the site has another 15 pages of related content, the home page itself must be focused on those keywords. Secondly, this lesson also shows that each web page of a web site has a chance to show up in the search rankings by itself. This, in turn, leads to an even more important lesson.