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Homepages and SEO
From a serious SEO perspective we focus all our effort to rank as many pages as possible according to relevance for certain keywords but home page of a web is, usually, the main entrance door for a site.
A simple reason for it is that high percentage of links point to top in hierarchy page what makes it accumulate the maximum relevancy for that site.
Other disciplines affecting homepage success
Everything counts so I'm not going to cover in this article the most obvious ones, just some brief notes.
Usability: no mater how much traffic you bring if a bad user experience make them bounce without a click, you are done, zero conversions.
Design: not talking about style, design does not have to follow the latest trends if but it stands for credibility. Your web's design transmits the required credibility sense or not.
Information Architecture: what you do, how you do it, how you name it, who you are and how clear are all these questions answered to humans and search engine bots are key to increase this page profit.
Technical issues: does it block a perfect indexation? Any obtrusive dynamic Javascript / Ajax around? Is Html semantically good enough?
Homepage SEO check
I like to take an an 'x-ray picture' of the homepage asking Google to show its text version cached and review what is going under the flesh of design layer.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&strip=1&q=cache:http://www.mysite.com
What we should find there?
Nothing more and nothing less that the typical on page optimization elements than we have in the rest of the site's pages.
All this talking loud to say nothing?. Don't blame me, ask somebody else why design / multimedia / engagement elements and all this paraphernalia is got too much attention at home page but not the most basic thing: what the hell is this site about in plain text.
Of course search engines will understand what the topic of the site is even if your home page is blank as we'll see in a weird example but making it pretty easy is something humans and search engines will appreciate a lot.
H1
Can you imagine a news without a good heading? Same rule to apply here, your home page, your site needs a simple and effective <h1> but not applied to the logo on top left just text.
Not need to mention that <h1> must be unique per page and the rest of heading tags, <h2>, <h3>, <h4> must be ordered hierarchically.
Description
Not too long but some generic description, a paragraph or two explaining what visitors are going to find and / or why they should go ahead exploring the site.
Links collection
Yes a bunch of links pointing to main categories and subcategories, navigation menu, and some other ones pointing to pages you want to receive direct link love from home.
Others
The rest is up to you, pics, flash animation, JavaScript driven slide-shows, newsletter registration forms, contact us badges or any other thing required.
Order in those elements
This is there 99.98% of home pages and 99.99% on internal pages fail. What is the order of relevance of those elements? H1 + content, navigational links and the rest (visual header thing and footer) so this is the order they should be Html coded inside the <body tag> and reorder them visually with CSS techniques to make appear the right visual order: 'head, content, navigation, footer' or 'head, navigation, content, footer'.
Some homepages to analyze
nokia.ca
This company is one of my favorite SEO disasters taking into account how big they are and how bad they do on line worldwide, not only in Canada.
Take a look at http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://www.nokia.ca none of the relevant elements mentioned previously. No H1, no description, just menu's links (horrible anchor texts, by the way), they don't even mention 'mobile' or 'phone'!
Ok, ok, everybody knows what they do but do you want to compete on line or not? Why not get more organic traffic for the few money it represents to them?
dell.ca
Not much better but some keywords are found along the home like 'Laptops', 'Tablets', 'Desktops', 'Workstations', 'Servers', 'Printers' as you can see http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://dell.ca
Anchor texts are a bit better.
ibm.com/us/en/
http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://www.ibm.com/us/en/
Hooray one H1 at last! but horrible one that I copy here just in case they change it: 'Here are some government cuts everyone can agree on. Agencies cut costs, response time and fraud with smarter systems. Here's how.'
According to Wikipedia IBM a is 'multinational computer, technology and IT consulting corporation' a much better description for their H1. H1 no need to be the most visible element of the page, CSS can do the trick.
It is true that trying to rank such a generic thing makes no sense but does it mean you have to do it so bad? In my opinion no.
lululemon.com
http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://lululemon.com
Yes! They have nice descriptive H1 and short paragraph after. Perfect? No, first, they are not at the top of the <body> Html section and second they have two H1s.
womenclothingtoday.com
http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://womenclothingtoday.com
Does it has H1? No,
Does it has H2? No,
Does it has H3? Yes, why not an H1 instead? No idea
Is it descriptive? 'Welcome to WomenClothingToday.com!' No,
What they have? 8 paragraphs of description! Isn't it too much? Yes, it is not a blog where you expect to find this amount of text. Do they want to explain, convince or just bore?
Last chance: Is this text optimized? No, zero.
vancouversun.com
Previous examples were corporative sites, what about an on line newspaper?
http://www.google.com/#strip=1&q=cache:http://www.vancouversun.com
H1 is their own brand, not bad, and it is placed quite close to the top but what is wrong here? All news titles are H1s also while they should be H2 or H3 according to relevance or time-line, H2 newest and H3 the old ones at the bottom of the page.
It is in the secondary pages where the news are deeply explained that they keep on having H1 for the newspaper name (wrong), the title of the story (wright) and any other news heading in the same page (wrong again).
This is another story but one H1 per page, please or it won't make sense.
The worst SEO homepage ranking good
Update: few days after I wrote this article the site desapeared from rankings. Is someone at G's Search Quality Team reading this blog? Anyway, makes me happy not to see crap arround.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&strip=1&q=cache:http://www.seoconsultants.ca
What they have to deserve this title? Nothing, this homepage is completely blank, the Html code breaks after <body> tag opening and that's not a casualty, it has been like this for a long time as I could check. The rest of the pages in this site are not working neither. Great job.
So, why are they ranking in third position for 'seo consultant'? Does it demonstrates all this article is absolutely irrelevant? I don't think so. First of all I have to remember you the big amount of ranking factors there are, they compensate this mess with 100,685 inlinks in example. Some of them add very little value but all are counting and the total is what matters in competition.
In other hand I consider this a Google's problem, this site shouldn't be ranking at all no matter what was it's relevancy in the past, right now it is nothing from user point of view and it represents a remarkable low quality result but you know, no piece of code is perfect and big G algorithm is not an exception.
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