Optimising Your Homepage

One of the most important pages of your website is your homepage and that’s because it is the page that most people will view.  It is the job of your homepage to attract visitors to the rest of your site and to convince them that your site is interesting and offers them what they are looking for.

Your homepage is not really designed for keyword optimisation and it isn’t the purpose of your homepage to rank highly for your main keywords.  A prime example of this might be eBay.  eBay.co.uk’s homepage does not rank highly for ‘boys mountain bike’ for instance, they have other pages specifically for that.

Your homepage is simply there to welcome visitors to your site and then point them in the direction, quickly and easily, of where they need to go to find what they are looking for.

High rankings for your particular keywords ARE important however and you should optimise other pages of your site for those.  The more pages you optimise, the better.  If feasible, you should optimise one page of your site for one search term.  A webpage that is relevant to one search term is better than a webpage that is relevant to several search terms.  And, if you optimise several of your webpages for different, yet related, topics, you will show Google and the other search engines that your site is relevant to that topic.

So what keywords will get your homepage higher rankings?

There are a limited set of search terms for which your homepage may get higher rankings.  These include:

• Your company name.
• Whether your company name contains relevant keywords.  Your site may rank for these if they are not too competitive.
• Whether you offer local services.  You homepage may rank in local searches for ‘electrician’ for example.

Your homepage can rank for other keywords if they are related to the company.  However it is more likely that other pages of your site will rank better for these. 

What you need to do to optimise your homepage.

Emphasis should be on optimising individual pages of your site for particular keywords but there are some important things you can do to specifically optimise your homepage:

• The title should focus on your company name, your main product and your service.
• Your homepage should include a detailed navigation menu to access all relevant areas of your site.
• Your homepage must easily and clearly communicate the main benefit of your product and services and include relatively good images depicting your products and/or services.
• Your homepage should show your contact information to provide trust and confidence to your visitors.

Check the basics before you start.

Optimising your website, and specifically your homepage, will only lead to positive results if your website is in optimum health.  What this means is that it shouldn’t be running slowly, it shouldn’t have any technical errors on pages or any broken links. 

A simple website audit will highlight any of these issues before you start the process of optimising your webpages for relevant keywords.