Startups.ie

The homepage on 99% of websites is the most important page. This is rightly so since this will usually be the first page people will find when they visit your site. There are a few key things to remember when creating content for the homepage.

Directions

The homepage should be used as a sign post for visitors, directing them to various pages on your site. There should be large and clear links to your other pages. You might summarise the page you are linking to, so people know if it is applicable to them. If you have a lot of products or services you don’t need to link to them all from the homepage. Put them in categories and link to the category instead.

Don’t push a sale

The number one mistake I see many people make is giving too much information and trying to sell everything on the homepage. There is a fear that if you don’t give enough info and push the sale your won’t get anything. This may be true for sales executives selling to people face to face as it is important to try close a deal within a set timeframe. This is far from the case when trying to sell your products and services online. People browsing the web have the luxury of time being on their side. They can choose to browse your entire site, your competitors site and spend an hour on each without anyone telling them what to do or how to see things. They might come back and look through your site again in a week or 2.

By pushing the sale you do a lot of different things:

• Seem needy (nobody buys from people trying too hard to sell something).
• Look only interested in your own business.
• Neglect to show the reasons to do business with you.
• Forget about the things that might be important to the customer as you’re blinded by the sales process.

Do not welcome people

This is really my number one issue with homepage content. The “Welcome to our site” text does nothing for anyone.
Firstly the text is usually placed in the h1 or h2 tag on your site. The h1 tag is the most important tag on your site. It is like the headline of a newspaper. H2 is the subheading. Google puts a lot of prominence on the tag structure of your site. So by telling google that “Welcome to my www.yoursite.com” you are saying this is what my site is about. This is my headline. Do you think someone will ever do a Google search for “Welcome to www.yoursite.com” ? I will go into more detail about title tags in a later article.
Secondly nobody really cares about the name of your company or website until you prove that you deserve to be remembered. The name of your site is probably your company name. You also probably have your logo at the top of the page. So there’s no need to keep drilling your name into people before they even know what you do.

Your title or intro line should include the keywords people will search but also show them you do or sell exactly what they are looking for.

wrote by Dave: HiddenDepth.ie