Fill your homepage with links to your site’s “highlights”
January 23, 2012 | Shawn Smalley — View Recent Posts
So far in this series we'll talked about not limiting your use of keywords and how to best use headlines, list, and hyperlinks to get noticed. Today we're focusing on filling your homepage with links to your sites "highlights".
This is actually one of the best things you can do for your homepage, as it’ll end up making it more interesting than just some generic paragraphs about yourself or your business model. The best homepages should engage with the visitors and try to get them started on finding whatever it is that brought them to your website. They just came to your site from the search engines with a particular topic in mind, so the faster they find that topic the more they feel like they’re in the right place. Calling out to your “highlights” as links that say essentially “Looking for this? Here it is!” will make sure they spend less time spinning their wheels on your welcome page and more time reading what was relevant to them.
Think about it like a news website. Their homepage isn’t “here’s how long we’ve been in business, here’s what news we like to cover and here’s all about our employees”. Instead they categorize the news by interests (local, world, politics, entertainment, economy, etc.) and put the top stories under those categories. If you’re on a news site and want to know what the top local headlines are then you won’t have to do much poking around to find out. They put the focus on the visitor’s immediate needs rather than on the people or company behind the site. It’s about service, not about tooting your own horn.
This also helps search engines because it tells them what you feel is the most important contents of your site. They emphasize anything you link on your homepage, which is another reason to call out to your main key words or phrases while you’re at it (like mentioned in the previous tip). Links count for much more than just text because both visitors and search engines know that clicking on those words will take them to more information on that topic.
For some step-by-step instructions complete with examples check out my class “
Brand Building and SEO Boosting” which will also cover some of the other tips we’ll be discussing in the coming weeks. It’s a great introduction to SEO from the perspective of the little things you can do that make a big difference. Have a great week!
