Home Page - Generating an Effective Front Page
The front page of your website should accomplish a couple of
things. First, it needs to be able to quickly grab a visitor's
interest. Second, it needs to be set up so that search engines
can easily and properly index it.
I generally have clients come up with about twenty keywords that
they want search engines to index their site under. Then I have
them include as many of those as they can in their front (or
home) page without sounding unnatural.
The structure I advise in general for home pages is one or two
paragraphs with 2-4 sentences apiece. This should then be
followed by a bulleted list or two of some sort. This will serve
both our first and second purposes. For search engines, not
having tons and tons of text will give more relative weight to
the keywords you use. This will make your site rank relatively
higher in the search engine's results for those keywords.
For visitors to your site, a short paragraph or two followed by
a bulleted list will make it quickly obvious to them whether
your site is worth investigating in further detail. For that
reason, the two paragraphs of text should be a general summary
of the rest of the site and of your business. This is not really
the place to tell a detailed story. Instead, you can mention the
story and provide a link to it elsewhere on your site.
If your front page write-up is effective, it will benefit your
business. A higher search engine ranking and visitors who
explore more of your site will be the result.