Get Search Engines to link to sub-pages instead of index

Question

I wrote a blogging system from scratch (http://seanhess.net). I have the last 10 posts displayed on the index page /, and each post has it's own page /post/a_simple_post. I'm getting a good rank in google when I search for specific info from my posts, but google links to the index page instead of the post page. How do I get the search engine to drill into those post links?

<div class="blog_post">
    <div class="info">
     <span class="tags">
   <a href="/tag/framework">Framework</a>
   <a href="/tag/php">PHP</a>
   <a href="/tag/tutorial">Tutorial</a>
     </span>  
     <span class="date">August 03, 2009</span>
    </div>
    <div class="content">
     <h1><a href="/posts/example_post">Example Post</a></h1>
     <p>Paragraph</p>
    </div>
</div>

Answer 1

The search engines already do it, unless your robots.txt file specifies otherwise, or some special attributes in your <a> tag (which it seems you are not using).

I think the only problem you are having is that your index page ranks much better than your sub-pages. This might be because people link to your index page.

Answer 2

Google probably displays your home page because it thinks it is a relevant answer to the search the user did...

One way that would help making your "post" pages more important is to display the full-content of the post on the home page for only the last post ; and, for the next ones, only display some excerpt, or a summary, or something like that.
It would make your post pages more important... But that would also mean having a "less important" home page... Which may or may not be good.

Google also uses links from other websites : if many important sites link to your homepage, and only a few link to your post pages, google will think the home page is more important than those.
As your blog is about PHP, one nice thing could be to be syndicated on http://www.planet-php.net/ : it allows many people to see your blog entries -- and is nice for visibility too (both to users and to google, as it has a high pagerank, I suppose)

Still, google is probably already exploring your whole site : if there are links to your post pages (there are on the home page, at least), google will visit thoses one day or another...

One thing I just noticed, though : your first post was in june, and you've been active only for a something like a month and a half ; it is not that long, especially if not many websites have links to yours...

In the end, there is only one secret : the more you'll write interesting stuff, the more people will find your blog interesting, the more they'll talk about it and include links to it, the more google will see about it too, the higher you'll be in results, and so on ;-)
But, yes, it takes time... Especially if you want to only write interesting posts -- and you should not post crap just to have lots of content !

I just saw you have a first blog on http://code.seanhess.net/ and that you now have another one on http://seanhess.net/ ; do you think it would be wise (depends on your content, on what you want and all that !) to move all blog-posts from the first one to the new one, adding permanent redirections on the old pages to the new ones ?

You might also want to take a look at some articles on the net, as well as some questions/answers here on SO, that could give you some useful advices. For instance :

• Is SEO knowledge important for web developers?
• Using SEO-friendly links
• What kind of SEO Technique need to apply for my website…
• SEO URL Structure
• and probably lots of others -- provided you know what you are searching for, you'll find lots of interesting "tips/techniques"

And if you search with... google for instance... you might find many interested articles on the net about that too...

Answer 3

It helps to have a descriptive title tag and meta description in each of the content pages. Google has a useful section and starter guide I refer to frequently on this topic: Google SEO site.

I recently finished this book on SEO which has a lot of useful tips on technique and online tools to help increase search rank: Kris Jones SEO book

What I've seen is the quickest way to move up in search rankings is to get pages linked to from other sites considered to be an authority on the topic the page is focused on.