You don’t have to be a genius to know that your home page is your most important page. In spite of all of the wonderful content you include in your interior pages, most often your home page will be the page to rank in the search engines for keywords that are important to you.
If you are using a static page for your home page, here are a few good ideas to follow:
Keep the design simple. Avoid having flashy animation or a large number of images. Google can’t read those splash pages or those little blinking cartoons. Make sure it is easy for Google to read.
Use a lot of “white space” in the design. Don’t overcrowd the front page. Studies have shown that visitors will back out of sites that look congested.
Make sure that the visitors will know what the site is about. Make sure they don’t have to work to hard to see what the site really is about. If you think your site’s purpose is blatantly obvious, look at it again.
Keep the number of links to a minimum. Don’t give the visitor a multitude of choices. Make certain your “Search Homes” and “Contact Me” links are obvious and located “above the fold” It may be a good idea to keep most of your nav links in one column. Don’t have too many. Large numbers of links will also cause people to back away. By the way, Google absolutely detests pages with more than 100 links and considers them “spammy.”
The page does not have to be huge. Some SEO experts claim that Google does not read anything past the first 100KB.
Keep links that go off-site from your home page to a minimum. Google robots will follow those things right off the page. Some SEO people think that external links “bleed” valuable page rank to whoever is downstream from that link.
Avoid excessive h1 tags. In fact, h1 tags should be used only once. After that, use h2 tags sparingly. Also, don’t “over-optimize.” Keywords are important, but the page should not read like it is “stuffed.”
Make sure the visitor can use the page without needing to follow any sort of instructions.
Keep those “widgets” down to a minimum. Don’t put gizmos, or “awards” or other linked items that link away from your site. Those gadgets that show avatars of the people who are reading your site don’t do you any good. Also, most of that stuff is just annoying clutter anyway.
If you use a social bookarking tool on the site, find one that is SEO friendly and is “nofollow.”
When in doubt, ask yourself “What can I eliminate?”
About your home page..
You don’t have to be a genius to know that your home page is your most important page. In spite of all of the wonderful content you include in your interior pages, most often your home page will be the page to rank in the search engines for keywords that are important to you.
If you are using a static page for your home page, here are a few good ideas to follow:
Possibly related:
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.