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My site is fairly new, e.g. example.com. I need to optimize the home page(example.com) for a keyword, e.g. healthy-food.

Does redirecting home page to example.com/healthy-food, would help in terms of SEO, since URL contains keyword the page is targeting for.

The issue with adding extra redirection is that it adds additional latency of 300ms while accessing the homepage, which I would like to avoid.

I do not want to put same content on example.com and example.com/healthy-food, since it will flag duplicate content.

Please advise.

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    Latency is the amount of time for data to travel between your location and your server. Are you sure that you mean latency? 300ms of latency would make the web unusably slow for me. If you don't mean latency and you mean the time to fulfill the request, 300ms seems like a lot. I usually see 20ms extra time when adding a redirect. I expect full pages to be served and rendered in 300ms.
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 13, 2019 at 22:30
  • @StephenOstermiller I use httpstatus.io to check the redirects and latency. It shows redirect latency as 339ms. See this screenshot: ibb.co/ch298SQ
    – Kaushal B
    Commented Feb 13, 2019 at 22:54
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    Kaushal good web hosting will return redirects at less than 0-100ms (0.1 seconds) - if you have anything above then you should assume you have one ore more of the following problems: 1. Crappy hosting, 2. Crappy routing between your website and httpstatus.io - httpstatus is not reliable for speed testing since it does not support multiple passes and multiple regions, use Chrome locally to do the tests using developer tools (F12 on PC) and the website Webpagespeed test which will allow you to test from various locations across the globe.
    – Simon Hayter
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 0:11
  • @SimonHayter Good advice. I checked using chrome dev tools and noticed the same behavior. The 301 redirect is set via code, which might be causing the delay, I will check if I can setup this via hosting configuration file. Thanks. :)
    – Kaushal B
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 1:47
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    See also: Are keywords in URLs good SEO or needlessly redundant?
    – Stephen Ostermiller ♦
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 11:53

2 Answers 2

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Summary:

NO. Since your website is new and has minimal value in eyes of Search Engines, targeting keywords with appropriate landing pages is better for SEO. Instead, you can add an internal link with the target keyword to your landing page.

Explanatory notes:

You only need redirections when your old page has an value attached to it and the redirection is meaningful and serves value to the new page that you are trying to redirect to.

  1. If you want to target your "keyword" to be ranked for your "homepage" then do the on-page optimization for "homepage" and the necessary off-page work.
  2. If you want to target your "keyword" to eb ranked for your "landing page" then do the on-page optimization for "homepage" and the necessary off-page work.
  3. Redirection is not required, if you're just trying to boost value to your landing page. You can add an internal link instead to pass the link juice.
  4. If you're trying to direct users to just visit your landing page and your homepage does not serve any value according to you, then redirecting is good.

Suggestions:

If you are related to Point 4, I would suggest you to have a landing page with any definitive CTA for your conversion instead of redirecting the page to your target landing page. In the long run, you would love to have a homepage to showcase your products or services.

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  • yes, you are correct. I'm situation is related to Point 4. I'll see your point. At this moment, I'm focused on one service/feature, for which I can make landing page. In future we might have more features. At that time, this approach will be handy to show all features on homepage.Thanks for the suggestion.
    – Kaushal B
    Commented Feb 14, 2019 at 18:08
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The home page is the main web page of the website. From this webpage, users and search engines begin to journey on your website. I dare to compare the homepage with the storefront. Glancing at a good storefront, you immediately understand what this business is offering. The same applies to websites and their home pages.

If your business is associated with healthy food, then in the content of the home page you need to specify a description of your business with a business entity such as healthy food. On the target web page about your healthy food, you create more detailed content content about the offers of your business. Of course, the content of the homepage and the target webpage must be different, because they have different goals. The home page has the goal to present the subject of your business in the SERP. If the user is interested in the proposed subject and went to the home page, then there he should find more general information about this subject. In this content, it may be useful to indicate the objects of your business, such as offering healthy food and a call to action, for example, see more or something similar. If the user is still interested in this, then he goes to the target web page which has content with detailed information about the objects of your business, for example a list of categories or offers. This will help the user to easily determine the path to achieve his goal on your website. And it will follow the rule of three clicks that will lead the user to his goal.

It is clear that a website having a subject, for example, such as healthy food, can have many web pages with content about healthy food. This can cause cannibalization of keywords. To avoid this negative signal, you can create links from web pages with duplicate keywords, to the homepage on which this keyword is used for the first time on the website and represents the subject of the entire website.

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