Is this competing against yourself?

I have a theory that my homepage is competing against other pages of my site. Should my homepage contain keywords of everything on my site or just one subject for the home page?

Right now I have each page optimized for one subject but the home page has all the keywords of all of the internal pages. The problem is search queries are pulling up the home page rather than the subject optimized page.

If I refocus my efforts on my home page will the serps rank the appropriate category subject page better?

Ok Bro you was just speaking rocket science let me take a minute to comprehend what you are saying .

Ok here is waht it sounds like you are saying you would like the homepage not to be indexed on some search quireys?

If that is not a problem for you . Your website is getting indexed in the position that you want I personally would not change a thing. Because if you do you may loose SeRP rank .

I think that what he is trying to say is each page on his website has different keywords. But his homepage has all the keywords on one page. So if somebody makes a search for a certain keyword he wants the page thats optimized for that keyword to rank higher than is homepage. Thats my understanding.. I may be wrong though

May be I am wrong but here is my opinion :-

You can never compete with your own pages till they are under same domain and user can navigate the pages from homepage. And you said that you have optimized every pages but I can't agree with you because adding title, keywords, description and some others don't optimize your pages fully. If it does then I don't think there are any unoptimized pages in this world coz everyone has those attributes in their websites. And if you have related information for specific niche instead of General niche then you are doing optimization in this sense. And if you have same keyword in many pages (which you think they are competing themselves) and don't look spammy or forcely inserted then it will increase your keyword density which is a good thing and has positive effect. So, you should not worry about this.

Why does it matter which of your pages show up? Do you have a high bounce rate because the page showing up isn't relevant to the search term?

Making the keywords on your home page links to your internal pages should help.

Nah, it doesn't matter. Google can rank 2 of your pages in the top 2. I have even seen 3 pages ranked 1, 2 and 3 from one site.

This isn't at all a problem. Just build links to where you'll make the money. (Usually not the home page).

if people land on your homepage, they have to click through to your optimized page, so people don`t land directly on the desired page.

thats just another click people have to make. and that uasaly loses some visitors

You mentioned you have all your website keywords on your homepage. Are you using those keywords as bold anchors linking to those specific pages?

Also be sure any other pages that link to those pages are using solid keywords when interlinking.

Or you might also try rel=nofollowing some of the your outbound links on those non-homepage keyword pages if they are currently linking to eachother. (Not sure how your link achitecture is laid out) That will give you more control over where link juice is flowing around the site. Just be careful sculpting the links with nofollow if you aren't sure how to do it .. in that case you need to study up on link sculpting with nofollow.

And whatever you dont nofollow your links back to the index/homepage.

Also are your offsite backlinks all pointing to the domain name? Try doing more deeplinking to the actual content/keyword specific pages of your website.