Lots of sites have a very simple homepage design. Google is a perfect example of this. However, I have found that loading up the homepage with information has increased sales, pageviews, visitor time-on-site, and linkbuild rate. (Rand and Matt's new design for seomoz.org - shown at right - also puts a lot of info up front).For a long time I worried that changing my homepages would put my rankings at risk but learned that I was wrong as long as I maintain basic SEO. Here are a few ways that I have used my homepages that have yielded good results.
RETAIL SITE:
- announce new items
- suggest holiday gifts
- suggest in-season items
- show off hot selling items or historic best sellers
- link to product category pages by manufacturer and product type
INFO SITE:
- show off new articles and resources
- point to newsy posts in my blog
- link to my most popular pages
- link to category pages by topic, geographic area, format
- promote pages that I hope will attract natural links
- inspire return visits by having new stuff above the fold every week
My homepage goal for both retail and info is to give the impression... "This site has everything!" I believe that this encourages visitors to go inside and snoop around. It also should promote bookmarking and linking.
How do you manage your homepage? Do you have ideas or a philosophy of homepage content that you can share for discussion here? What other items are worthy of homepage real estate?
We would love to hear your comments and ideas. Thanks!
Looking at that snapshot of the 2006 homepage and comparing it to the 2008 homepage, I can see that the 2008 one is SO much better designed. I like the 2008's simplicity, narrowness, even the sort of "checkerboard" effect that is created by the light and dark patches that form the different sections... I wonder if seomoz will be doing any more redesigning in the future or if they are FULLY happy with the current design permanently... hmmm..
Seomoz's home page is definitely one of the most beautiful start pages on the web in my humble opinion. Very professional looking and eye-pleasing design with high functionality. It says, not only do you talk the talk, but you walk the walk. Well done.
While I'm here - I have a question about RSS feeds and web site traffic - can you recommend a suitable forum where a mere mortal such as myself could bother the gurus with a (possibly stupid) question?
Dr. Joshua - We're all mere mortals, it's the search engine reps that get the respect :) As for a good forum - try www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/
On the retail sites I've built I always try and have a product search box very close to the top, as well as a quick "about us" blurb.
Per Rand's suggestion a few years ago I always try and make sure that actual products are shown on the home page, preferably as close to the top as possible so they'll see products without having to scroll.
I think the new Seomoz startpage is doing a very good job in this field.
We manage several EC sites and have noticed our highest converters also have the "busiest" homepages. We've been experimenting lately with trying to stuff even more on a couple of the sites, going so far as to change one site's header/footer and CSS files to include different colors and wrappers for special events. The early result -- very positive.
One thing we rarely mess with on homepages, however, is the main content. We have lots of text that covers what our companies do and we leave that be (we spruce it up from time to time). We also have dynamic elements on the homepages (blogs, news, etc) that is constantly changing with plenty of keyword rich content.
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