Your home page reveals a lot about your business. But it’s not only meant to be informational or look great – learn how website optimisation will turn bystanders into visitors and visitors into prospects.
Your website’s home page is often the first page a visitor will see. That’s why it’s important to ensure that it not only looks professional but also provides the information necessary for your users to continue browsing. At the least, your home page should give an overview of who you are, what your business offers, and what the benefits are of working with you or using your products.
Your website’s home page acts like an introduction to your business. People will immediately judge you based on what they see – and in most cases you only have a few seconds to make an impression.
But it’s not only your visitors that you should optimise your website for. Website optimisation will have an impact on search engines like Google. Search engines won’t care as much about how your websites looks, but rather what value it provides and how much attention a search engine like Google should pay to your website and the rank it gives you.
Website optimisation: the O in SEO
Your home page is the main page on your website. So make sure that it is always optimised in terms of content, keywords and structure. But don’t forget to focus on other pages too. You should ensure that all your pages are continually updated and optimised to maintain and improve your SEO rankings.
Here are a few tips to help you optimise your website’s home page:
- Compare it to your competitors’ websites. Try to make your home page look better than at least one of your competitors to compete with what they provide.
- Make sure you focus on what’s important. Don’t add irrelevant content; rather make sure that everything on your page encourages a user to take action in some form.
- Try to get your visitors to click to other pages. This means providing them with enough value and information to have them look at your products and services. It will reduce your bounce rate too.
- Always give a clear message as to who you are. Be sure to inform your visitors about your business, what you do and who you are.
- Make a great offer. Try to say something that will get people to remember you.
- Avoid clutter. Don’t confuse visitors with too much information. Use additional pages for this, to where they can click through if they need more information.
- Use selected keywords. Although you may have plenty of targeted keywords, don’t use all your keywords on one single page. User your home page to focus on the more important ones.
- Link to your Google+ page. Link to your profile using the rel=publisher mark-up. Doing this will tell Google that both pages are owned by the same business.
When it comes to the layout of your content, ensure that you give your visitors the best possible experience. This means avoiding clutter and making it easy for them to navigate. Also remember to link to the most important pages from your home page. It’s good for website optimisation and SEO and it’s also good for your visitors as they can easily find the information they are looking for.
Another tip to remember is not to link out to third party websites from your home page. This will give your visitors the option of linking away from your website. Do this from internal pages only.
Always balance the amount of text you have with the images on your website. You should not have too much text as this can make your home page look dull. Don’t over-use images either. If you do use images, remember to add meta information to them. It helps to boost your SEO and to optimise your images.
Keep your home page content up to date. Review your content every few weeks and update content where necessary. It will help to keep your visitors informed and to tell Google that you have fresh content to index. It’s a great way to boost your SEO efforts too.
Having a high quality website starts with good content. You can work with an experienced copy-writing team like The Content Works to help you create the right content for your web pages.