Search engine optimisation on your home page

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The home page of your website is the equivalent of the high street store front for your company. Making sure that your homepage is optimised and aimed at the visitor will encourage more people to visit more pages on your site and ensures Google will crawl the site as well. Statistics show that the homepage of a website is the most common entry point for visitors, so like your conventional store front, you want your homepage to sell to your visitors and make them want to read more.

There are a few tips to ensure your website homepage is optimised well for search engines but also focussed on visitors.

Don’t use a splash page – although splash pages can look good, from a visitors point of view they slow down the time it takes to get to the core information, and from Google’s point of view a splash page, particularly if it’s in Flash doesn’t provide any level of relevancy.
On the first page of the site (now you’ve removed your splash page) make sure that the purpose of the website is clear to the visitor, if you are a solicitor who specialises in family law, make this clear on the home page so that you don’t get conveyance or commercial law enquiries.
As mentioned in my previous post, make the navigation easy to use for both visitors and search engines, to ensure the sub pages of your site are accessible to all.
If you have a form on your homepage make it as simple as possible, don’t ask for too much information from your visitors as they are less likely complete the form and a bulky form on the home page clutters the space on the home page.
Make sure that the keywords you are using in your search engine optimisation campaign are prominent on the homepage so that you are more relevant to Google. This process will also help you have a good quantity of text on your homepage. Using your keywords on the homepage wll also make it clear to your visitors what the site is about.

Search Engine Optimisation is important for all of the pages on your website but the homepage is central to ensuring that your website attracts and keeps visitors.