5 Top Tips for Creating an SEO Friendly Homepage | Dynamic Marketing San Diego 2017
5 Top Tips for Creating an SEO Friendly Homepage
This is a really important topic to write about because I come across client’s websites constantly who have zero SEO optimization. It’s no fault of their own. Most website developers aren’t SEO professionals, and don’t spend the time optimizing the site to be crawled by search engines. And that’s where I come in.
SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEO is important because it allows search engines to understand what your website is all about. If you’re looking to increase website traffic and rank for specific keywords, SEO is going to be your best friend (i.e.: in my case, I’m a marketing agency. My homepage ranks #1 on google for: “Marketing Experts San Diego”).
Sure, you can have a successful business through word of mouth/referrals without ever worrying about SEO. But if you’re looking to expand your reach, get ahead of your competitors online, and increase online conversions - it would benefit you to A) invest your time in understanding SEO or B) hire a consultant like me to help.
If you have the time and want to understand what it takes to SEO optimize your homepage, this is the post for you. If you're a small business owner looking to expand your knowledge of SEO, or perhaps you've hired an SEO consultant or plan to & want to understand the lingo, this will be incredibly valuable. It includes all of the top tips you need to create an SEO friendly homepage.
Let’s begin.
Your homepage will likely be your most trafficked page when getting started. This is why we’re starting here. After you SEO optimize your homepage, you will need to optimize each individual webpage. Yes, each individual page. SEO isn’t hard, as some “black-hat,” overpaid SEO consultants might try to make you believe… but it does take a lot of time. It's takes hours to initially optimize, close monitoring, and 6 months to 1 year to see the results. No joke. That’s why small business owners pay me to do it for them.
Tip #1: Your homepage, as your most trafficked traffic page on the site (at least in the beginning), needs to be easy to read for search engines as well as humans. Have you ever seen a website where the text sounds robotic? That’s because bad SEO’ers have tried to rig the system and have only made the webpage easy to read for search engines. Those pages might get a lot of website traffic, but the conversions take a hit.
Honestly, we worry about numbers too much…from our website traffic to the number of likes and followers we have…You guys, it’s about the conversions. You can have all the website traffic in the world, or all the followers in the world, but if you don't get leads it's pointless.
Tip #2: Make sure your website loads fast. If your site loads slowly, you will surely lose site visitors - we call this “bounce rate”. You can use google page speed insights for this by clicking here.
Tip #3: Optimize your homepage meta-data. This means your title tag, meta description, and alt-text. If this sentence loses you, contact us.
Bonus! Meta-data tips:
- Your homepage keyword should be mentioned first in your title tag. Include your brand in the title tag next as this helps with search engine rankings. Keep your title tags under 60 characters in length.
- Meta-descriptions used to have an impact on your SEO. Now, search engines no longer crawl them. The purpose of the meta description is to provide a captivating sentence or two to entice searchers to click on your link in the search results. Write a great meta-description that provides further detail into what searchers can expect from your website. Include your keyword once here. Keep your meta-description under 160 characters in length.
- Alt text is the alternative text on the images on your site. This helps search engines understand what the images are. Include the keyword for that webpage in the alt-text as well as 1-2 words that describe what that picture is.
Tip #4: Link to other webpages on your site from your homepage. Homepage links have more link juice due to the traffic on that webpage, so create internal links to other webpages on your site. Make sure that you include the keyword for that webpage in the anchor text (hyperlink). Creating contextually appropriate internal links to other pages of your site will help grow traffic throughout your website and keep visitors on your pages longer.
Tip #5: Once you start ranking in the search results for your homepage’s keyword, just expand on that keyword in the content. Write an additional 2-3 sentences that expand on that keyword. Your position in the rankings can change constantly - just because you end up on the first page of Google doesn’t mean you’ll be there 2-3 weeks later. Expanding on your keyword will help strengthen it.
And there you have it! Those are my 5 top tips for creating an SEO friendly homepage. If this post made your head explode, and you’d like some help with this, please contact us to schedule a complimentary consultation. We always offer a free SEO evaluation for your site.
If you enjoyed reading this post or have a question about SEO, leave me a comment below! It makes my day to hear from you guys :)
All the best,
Michaela