For this example, I was making the assumption that the site owner had been targeting the broad homepage with specific keywords, through various methods including but not limited to meta-tags, PPC ads, link building, etc - in the hopes of generating traffic to Maroon 5 page by way of the homepage.

My advice here would be simple. Skip adding “Maroon 5″ to the home page title tag and other meta-data, and target the home page with more appropriate keyword phrases, like [rock bands] or [music fan sites]. Yeah, those phrases probably suck, but you get the idea.

Why? Because it’s highly doubtful that the home page would rank for the specific keyword phrase naturally. Bloggers and other webmasters (with few exceptions) would be much more likely to link to the band page when talking about the band, and nothing on the home page would lead the search engine spiders to believe it was better than the band page in a search for the band. This would generally only occur as the result of a mis-aimed SEO campaign.

nice article. so what changes would you recommend to this hypothetical site to make the maroon 5 page rank and not the generic home page?

and the crowd goes wild!!!