More SEO News

Mar
18

The Home Page

Your homepage is the most important page on your
web site. If you concentrate your most important
keywords and key phrases in your homepage many
times, the search engines will surely notice and
index it accordingly.

But will it still read easily and will the
sentences flow freely to your real human visitors?

There are some good chances that it might not. As
a primer, having just 40 or 50 words on your
homepage will not deliver the message effectively.
To be powerful and effective, a homepage needs at
least 300 to 400 words for maximum search engine
throughput and effectiveness.

One way to do that is to increase your word count
with more value-added content. This often means
rewriting your whole homepage all over again. The
main reason to this is you will probably never
have enough room to skillfully work your important
keywords and key phrases into the body text of your
homepage.

This may not please your boss or marketing
department, but a full re-write is often
necessary and highly advisable to achieve high
rankings in the engines, while at the same time
having a homepage that will please your site
visitors and convert a good proportion of them
into real buyers.

The Acid Test

Here is the acid test that will prove what we
just said is right: Carefully examine the body
text of your existing homepage. Then, attempt
to insert three to five different keywords and
key phrases three to four times each, somewhere
within the actual body of your existing page.

In doing that, chances are you will end up with
a homepage that is next to impossible to
understand and read.

One mistake some people do is to force their
prospects to wade through endless key phrase
lists or paragraphs, in an attempt to describe
their features and benefits. The other reason
they do that is in trying to please the search
engines at the same time.

Writing a powerful and effective homepage around
carefully defined keywords and key phrases is a
sure way you can drive targeted traffic to your
web site and keep them there once you do.

If some people still say re-writing a homepage
takes too much time and costs too much money,
think of the cost of losing prospective clients
and the real cost of lost sales and lost
opportunities.

In the end, writing a strong homepage that will
achieve all your desired goals will largely
justify your time invested and the efforts you
will have placed in the re-writing of your
homepage.

This section presents a recommended layout for
your homepage in order to make it as search
engine friendly as possible. This is where you
set the theme of your site. Let’s suppose the
primary focus of your site is about online
education.

You also have secondary content that is there
as alternative content for those not interested
online education. There is also other content
that you would like to share with your visitors.

For example, this might include book reviews,
humor, and links.

The top of your homepage, as discussed earlier
is the most important. This is where you set
the keywords and theme for the most important
part of your site, the thing you really want
to be found for.

Step By Step Page Optimization

Starting at the top of your index/home page
something like this:
(After your logo or header graphic)

1) A heading tag that includes a keyword(s) or
keyword phrases. A heading tag is bigger and
bolder text than normal body text, so a search
engine places more importance on it because
you emphasize it.

2) Heading sizes range from h1 – h6 with h1
being the largest text. If you learn to use
just a little Cascading Style Sheet code you
can control the size of your headings. You
could set an h1 sized heading to be only
slightly larger than your normal text if you
choose, and the search engine will still see
it as an important heading.

3) Next would be an introduction that
describes your main theme. This would include
several of your top keywords and keyword
phrases. Repeat your top 1 or 2 keywords
several times, include other keyword search
terms too, but make it read in sentences that
makes sense to your visitors.

4) A second paragraph could be added that got
more specific using other words related to
online education.

5) Next you could put smaller heading.

6) Then you’d list the links to your pages,
and ideally have a brief decision of each link
using keywords and keyword phrases in the text.
You also want to have several pages of quality
content to link to. Repeat that procedure for
all your links that relate to your theme.

7) Next you might include a closing, keyword
laden paragraph. More is not necessarily better
when it comes to keywords, at least after a
certain point. Writing “online education”
fifty times across your page would probably
result in you being caught for trying to cheat.
Ideally, somewhere from 3% – 20% of your page
text would be keywords. The percentage changes
often and is different at each search engine.
The 3-20 rule is a general guideline, and you
can go higher if it makes sense and isn’t
redundant.

Finally, you can list your secondary content
of book reviews, humor, and links. Skip the
descriptions if they aren’t necessary, or they
may water down your theme too much. If you must
include descriptions for these non-theme
related links, keep them short and sweet. You
also might include all the other site sections
as simply a link to another index that lists
them all. You could call it Entertainment,
Miscellaneous, or whatever. These can be sub-
indexes that can be optimized toward their own
theme, which is the ideal way to go.

Now you’ve set the all important top of your
page up with a strong theme. So far so good,
but this isn’t the only way you can create a
strong theme so don’t be compelled into
following this exact formula. This was just
an example to show you one way to set up a
strong site theme. Use your imagination, you
many come up with an even better way.

Video with tips and techniques on SEO
http://businesspromembers.com/traffic