In most instances, a site’s home page is the first thing a user sees after clicking on a link in the SERPs. Sites with unattractive home pages are more likely to bounce users than draw them in. This is a shame, considering the amount of SEO effort that usually goes into boosting a home page’s ranking.

The home page of your site should be its face. Like a shop front, it should be understood at a glance, giving the user everything they need to know about your business instantly. A lot of the factors of a successful home page are subconscious. This doesn’t mean that they are impossible to control. In fact, the home page is more manageable if it is taken element by element.

The first, of course, is the design. It is almost universally recommended that a home page be divided into manageable sections, in ways that can be easily scanned with the eye and through which important words, specifically those involved in your search engine optimisation plan, can stand out. This means allowing a fair amount of white space, and careful selection of fonts.

Your home page needs to transmit your main message very clearly in the first few words, and then segment your users out into appropriate sections. For example, a children’s retail site might have an overarching banner of ‘Toys direct to you’ with a small blurb, but subsections such as ‘Christmas toy sale,’ ‘Infants: tips for new mothers,’ ‘Indoor play equipment’ and so on. Each of these sections needs to be carefully chosen to attract one particular type of user and address their need specifically.

This kind of specificity is because a home page needs to have enough segmentation to provide for every type of user you expect on your site. If you can have a clear section that jumps out at users because it addresses their specific need, it is more likely they will move further into the site. This means including a fair amount of direct wording. The home page isn’t the place for too much subtlety. Take the above example. The segment ‘Christmas toy sale’ would be an eye-catching button, to provide a direct path for customers looking for bargains. The segment for new mothers is titled differently because it aims to engage the user on a deeper level, drawing them in with information. ‘Indoor play equipment’ addresses a seasonal need for customers during winter and would be changed as the seasons pass.

Segmenting user attention in this way also allows for prominent placement of your major keywords for the site. Each of these sections would have a link anchored to a keyword specific to the linked page.

Your home page is the shop front of your site, but it’s also the first contact as well. It should be both the first view and the first ‘hello, how can we help you?’ approach to your site’s users. The more direct questions your home page answers, the more site users you are greeting in a ‘personal’ manner. For additional information, do not hesitate to talk to our experts at SEO Consult.

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Tags: Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation, seo, SERPs

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.