Homepages and Search Engine Optimisation

I’ve been having a discussion about what makes for a good homepage. Just saying “the homepage is important for SEO” isn’t much use to anyone, unless you can understand exactly why. Understanding such things enables people to make better decisions about other related factors too. The conversation caused me to go over one of the basics- and it reminded me that good advice can be timeless.

Homepages are important because they…

• are often the first port of call when an engine crawls the site.
• show the engines what type of content and messaging they are likely to find within the site.
• are an important factor in helping determine the relevance of the site as a whole in terms of target audience and what they are searching for.

Allied to these is the issue of crawlability.

Making the site as accessible as possible is a big factor in search success- this can be achieved by presenting a homepage link to a sitemap page, footer linking to key pages using keywords as anchor text, hosting a sitemap.xml at root, inbound linking to deeper site pages, and other techniques. However the effectiveness of these techniques will be lessened if the homepage struggles to provide that “relevance” flag.

Optimising the homepage and linking to it is an important objective for SEO with any site, and for that to work it needs content. Some designs for instance may be fine looking pages, but with scant text content. They could contain clear navigation and beautiful button links to e.g. the Service A directory and Product B directory, where each has its own distinct set of content and messaging.

On their own these homepage links will allow search engine access to the key directories and pages, but there is little to provoke interest in the first instance. ill allow search engine access to the key directories and pages, but there is little to provoke interest in the first instance. Google in particular is becoming better at mimicking what humans look for in a website, so descriptive, natural content is more important than ever.

By providing optimised content for both Service A and Product B on the homepage (with appropriate topic-relevant keywords) you can sell the homepage better to the engines, and encourage natural crawling. Without that the homepage runs the risk of appearing a little like a gateway page and will struggle to get the search engine attention it deserves. The impact would be that those deeper pages also struggle.

If there are constraints that affect content placement consider either locating it below the fold or in crawlable drop-down sections.