I have a website that publishes useful information on various topics. Some of those sub pages will have some advertisements in the future, some of them won't. Submitting this website to a directory allows me to target only the main page which is so general that it is impossible to target it to the content of the sub pages. But the sub pages will be linking to each other if they share the similar topic. My question is: Does the keywords used in links pointing to my main page hurt (because of not being relevant) the ranking of the sub pages that are optimized for completely different keywords than the front page? This question has always bothered me. Please clear the waters for me here.
While having unrelated anchor text won't harm your home page, they won't help much, either. I would suggest building links to each of your varied category pages with relevant anchor text. For example, if it's a news site, build links to a business page with "business news" and sports page with "sports news" while the links for your home page would just say "news." This is obviously a very simplified model, but building optimized landing pages with links that point to them within your site is a very deft SEO strategy employed by the best in the business.
You always optimise pages and not website, so you can freely promote a page unrelated to main page without a problem.
Point your links with the anchor in the corresponding pages. You can be sure that the result will be much better.
Those unrelated pages will not hurt your website rankings. It is normal for a website to have at least some pages that aren't directly related to their target keywords. You are right in thinking that a link from a relevant page helps more. Links from irrelevant pages do help, but likely not as much as a page that has your target keywords in the title, url, content, etc.
Thank you everyone for the info! I will do deep linking whenever possible (especially from specific forums) but directories usually don't allow deep linking. So I guess I can use the PR I get to the front page to be spread over the content pages with smart internal linking.
I have only just started exploring social bookmarking sites, but Squidoo does allow deep linking - you could I believe create a separate lens for each subject with deep links to the appropriate pages.
This is definitely a good strategy. You can set up blogs, find other relevant sites to ask for links, and use blog commenting as other strategies for getting deep links. Not only will this help your deep landing pages, it will give your domain a wider variety of links, which is definitely a solid strategy for building a respected domain.
well as of for the sub pages.........they must be targeted for the keywords that are relevant to them..........linking your home page and effect is on subpages...is no way related ........ i think are not sure what you are asking or might want to post anything and you posted this????????/