Is Your “Home” Link Damaging Your On-Page SEO?

Most websites have a navigation menu system that is applied to every page of the site (you could have hundreds of thousands of pages with the same navigation menu). 8/10 times, the navigation menu has a link back to the homepage and it is the first link with the anchor text “Home”.

Since there’s not many cases were having the keyword “Home” is applicable, having the anchor text as home gives no benefit to the site.

Although I haven’t done any conclusive tests to prove that this works, I believe that inbound links play a part in building up the page theme so when you’re using the word “Home” as the anchor text you are essentially telling Google that your page is about “Home”. There have also been tests to suggest that Google only counts the first link when it comes to ranking the targeted page.

For this reason, I belive that the first link in the navigation should contain the main target keyword. Agreed, having the link anchor text as “Home”  allows users to navigate around the site easily as every visitor knows that a link saying “Home” will take you back to the homepage.

I think that we need to compromise between using the anchor text “Home” and the targeted keywords while still making sense to the user for example;

If I have as site that is to do with kitchens and I wanted to target the key-phrase “Kitchen Units”, I’d look at changing the “Home” link in the navigation menu system to being “Kitchen Units Home”.

I’m currently doing my own tests and you shouldn’t take the word for any SEO technique until you learnt and tested the technique yourself.