John Mueller of Google was asked another interesting question in this Friday's SEO hangout. The question was, do you need to optimize your whole website if you only care to have one URL, one page, on that whole website to rank well?
The answer was not necessarily but it does help the one page to rank if the other pages on the site are optimized. John said "we do look primarily at the page when it comes to ranking but it is always embedded within the context of your whole website." He added "I would say it is worthwhile to improve your website overall" explaining that Google does "understand a lot better how this particular page is really important and what the value of that particular page really is," if you optimize the whole site around it.
Specifically John explained the "internal linking and understanding of the headings and the content of the pages, all of that helps us even if it is outside of that one page that you care about."
So John said "I would say if you care about one particular page on your website, then you should make sure make sure that the rest of the website that is associated with that one page is also improved as much as possible."
This was asked and answered at the 23:17 mark in this video:
Question: Is it necessary to optimize the whole website if you want to rank for a particular page or the URL or is it okay if you don’t optimize the whole website?
Answer: In general, we do look primarily at the page when it comes to ranking but it is always embedded within the context of your whole website. So that is something where I would say it is worthwhile to improve your website overall, so that we actually understand a lot better how this particular page is really important and what the value of that particular page really is.
So in particular things like internal linking and understanding of the headings and the content of the pages, all of that helps us even if it is outside of that one page that you care about.
So I would say if you care about one particular page on your website, then you should make sure make sure that the rest of the website that is associated with that one page is also improved as much as possible.
Forum discussion at YouTube Community.
