More about Home Pages
You can skip this section for now if you just want to create your homepage content and go on the the next step. This will all be covered later in the course as well.
Before we go any further with the content on the homepage, I would like to introduce a concept we have not talked about yet that I think is important to understand right now. Also we will talk a little more about the homepage in general to help you think about your own homepage.
The system that I am having you go through is a 3 part process - Create / Promote / Optimize. These steps are then repeated over and over again, either with your current website or a brand new one.
Simply put, CREATE is the process of writing the content of the pages, PROMOTE is the process of getting your site found on the internet, and OPTIMIZE is the process of making changes to your site so it performs better. We will go into details on all three steps, but for now this is all you need to know.
We have talked about how end users use a home page and what we want to put as our content, but how do we as webmasters use are home page to the maximum extent. Lets look at what we already know:
1. Most of your traffic will come to your homepage - What can we do with this?
a. If I have something I really want people to see, I should showcase it on my homepage
b. If I am selling advertisment space on my site, I will charge the most for my homepage
I also mentioned that most people do not read what is on the homepage. What I am refering to is your content, your words, your sales pitch, your paragraphs. If you want to show them a hot promotion, they will see that. If you want to showcase a particular link or page on your site, they will see that too. But, as we get more and more used to looking at webpages, we pretty much tune out the fluff. Interesting enough though, we still need to optimize this section.
2. Why should we if no one reads it?
Well, when I say no one reads it, I mean humans don't read it. But, humans are not the only thing that visit our sites. All the search engines have these programs called spiders (we will go over this more) that come and read your pages and store them in the search engine. From this stored page, the search engine trys to figure out what your site and or page is about. What we really want is the search page to select our page in the results when someone searches for a term that we want.
3. Why should we optimize the homepage?
We have an entire page to tell the search engines about our site! If no one reads it or cares about our home page content, we can make it tell the search engines what we want.
So right now you should have your 3 ideas, 3 titles, 3 pages of content. You might have looked at some other websites, and you may have thought of some new ideas when you have been doing all your content writing. What search terms are important to you? What word(s) or phrase(s) do you want to be found for?
If there is something you want the search engine to know about your site, MAKE SURE IT IS IN THE CONTENT ON YOUR HOME PAGE. If this word or phrase is very important to you, make sure it is in the content on your home page MULTIPLE TIMES.
To conclude - As webmasters, we can:
use the home page to showcase a particular product, link, whatever
use the home page to sell our most expensive ads
use the home page to let the search engines know what are site is about
We will get more into this later. I wanted you to understand this now while you are writing your homepage content so you can make sure you get the terms that are important to you into your paragraphs. If you don't do it now, we will obviously do it later in the optimize section.
Before we go any further with the content on the homepage, I would like to introduce a concept we have not talked about yet that I think is important to understand right now. Also we will talk a little more about the homepage in general to help you think about your own homepage.
The system that I am having you go through is a 3 part process - Create / Promote / Optimize. These steps are then repeated over and over again, either with your current website or a brand new one.
Simply put, CREATE is the process of writing the content of the pages, PROMOTE is the process of getting your site found on the internet, and OPTIMIZE is the process of making changes to your site so it performs better. We will go into details on all three steps, but for now this is all you need to know.
We have talked about how end users use a home page and what we want to put as our content, but how do we as webmasters use are home page to the maximum extent. Lets look at what we already know:
1. Most of your traffic will come to your homepage - What can we do with this?
a. If I have something I really want people to see, I should showcase it on my homepage
b. If I am selling advertisment space on my site, I will charge the most for my homepage
I also mentioned that most people do not read what is on the homepage. What I am refering to is your content, your words, your sales pitch, your paragraphs. If you want to show them a hot promotion, they will see that. If you want to showcase a particular link or page on your site, they will see that too. But, as we get more and more used to looking at webpages, we pretty much tune out the fluff. Interesting enough though, we still need to optimize this section.
2. Why should we if no one reads it?
Well, when I say no one reads it, I mean humans don't read it. But, humans are not the only thing that visit our sites. All the search engines have these programs called spiders (we will go over this more) that come and read your pages and store them in the search engine. From this stored page, the search engine trys to figure out what your site and or page is about. What we really want is the search page to select our page in the results when someone searches for a term that we want.
3. Why should we optimize the homepage?
We have an entire page to tell the search engines about our site! If no one reads it or cares about our home page content, we can make it tell the search engines what we want.
So right now you should have your 3 ideas, 3 titles, 3 pages of content. You might have looked at some other websites, and you may have thought of some new ideas when you have been doing all your content writing. What search terms are important to you? What word(s) or phrase(s) do you want to be found for?
If there is something you want the search engine to know about your site, MAKE SURE IT IS IN THE CONTENT ON YOUR HOME PAGE. If this word or phrase is very important to you, make sure it is in the content on your home page MULTIPLE TIMES.
To conclude - As webmasters, we can:
use the home page to showcase a particular product, link, whatever
use the home page to sell our most expensive ads
use the home page to let the search engines know what are site is about
We will get more into this later. I wanted you to understand this now while you are writing your homepage content so you can make sure you get the terms that are important to you into your paragraphs. If you don't do it now, we will obviously do it later in the optimize section.
posted by Big Dave at 11:32 AM
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