Almost everyone has done a Google search in an attempt to find something, whether that is to look for a product, a service, some info, to kill some time, or anything in between. One thing you probably have noticed when doing these searches is how often “home pages” appear in the search results for most keyword phrases.
Example: Butcher Shop
Home pages appear so often because they are seen as one of the most important pages of a website (its core!) and because of this, the home page usually has the highest “SEO authority” of all of a website’s pages, allowing it to rank that much more often than the other pages of a site for various keyword searches. Because of this, it is important to make sure the home page is as SEO optimized a possible, as any SEO activity you do on your home page will tend to have the biggest bang for the buck. Below are 5 tips to help make your website home page more search engine friendly!
1. H Tags – H tags are important for SEO, as they help define the overall “theme” of your website and its content, and because of this, your homepage should include at least one H1, H2 & H3 tag.
H1 Tags – You should only have a single H1 tag, which is used to set the overall theme of the entire page. On your home page, the H1 title should mainly be used to describe what your business does, ideally using a target keyword you want to rank better for.
Example H1:
H2 Tags – Your homepage H2 Tag(s) should be slightly more long-tailed and slightly less specific to a single topic/theme. They should also ideally including target keywords for added SEO benefit and possibly even a primary target location for an extra local boost.
Example H2:
H3 Tags – Any other headings on your homepage (such as footer or sidebar headings) should then be made into H3 tags (including target keywords for these H3 titles is less important).
Example H3’s:
2. Optimized Homepage Content – As the old SEO saying goes, “content is king”. It is amazing how many small business websites out there are lacking on the content side of things, especially on one of the most important pages: the home page. By simply adding a 200+ word keyword-focused paragraph to your home page, you can greatly increase its SEO value and your overall site rankings. It is also good practice to include 2-3 keyword-focused links from your home page, pointing to some of the more important internal pages of your site, to help give them an added SEO boost, as well!
Home Page Content Example:
3. Product/Service List – Your homepage is a powerful page when it comes to SEO weight, and because of this, it is also important that you use it to boost some of your other important internal pages, such as your product and/or service pages. By simply highlighting some of your products/services on your home page through links, you can greatly boost their importance and overall SEO authority, all while showcasing your most important content better for your users.
Product/Service Example:
4. Home Page Slider – A slider is simply an area of your site that rotates or “slides” from one piece of content to another without the user actually changing pages. These “sliders”, which are normally found near the top of the page, can be a very powerful tool to showcase a select few of your most important pages to your users and give those same pages an additional SEO boost by linking to them from the slider title and image. Due to their highly visual nature and the added SEO benefits, adding a multi-pane slider to your website is highly recommended, especially on the home page!
Home Page Slider Example:
5. Dynamic Content – Search engine crawlers such as GoogleBot (Google) and Slurp (Yahoo!) like when a website’s content is already changing and being expanded on, and because of this, having some form of “dynamic” and “changing” content is always a good idea (especially on the home page). By having some content on your homepage that is always changing or being updated, such as a social feed, a recent blog widget, or even manually updating some home page content daily, you can make your website’s content less static.
Because your content appears to always be changing, the search engine crawlers for the most part will increase their crawl rate to your website accordingly, so instead of checking on your site once a week, they might increase to checking it once a day instead. This increased crawl rate makes them able to find new content or content changes that much faster, and over time they will even start doing deeper crawls of your website than they normally would, which helps keep your site’s indexing as fresh and complete as possible.
I hope these tips on making your home page more search engine-friendly have been helpful. If you need assistance with putting any of these strategies into action, our team here at WordJack is always willing to help.
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WordJack Media provides a wide range of website design and online marketing solutions to clients throughout Canada and the US, including Collingwood ON, Ottawa ON, Barrie ON, Miami FL, Lakeland FL, Orlando FL, Charlotte NC, Hickory NC, Asheville NC and more. Contact WordJack Media today for more information about how we can help your business win on the web!
