Looking through many different websites over the years it never ceases to amaze me how website owners still to this day neglect their homepage. For many website owners and web designers, the homepage is nothing more than a cover to display pretty pictures and to entice visitors into the website. Some websites don’t even link back to the homepage from the inner pages, preferring to isolate the homepage as something that the website’s visitors only need to see once when they enter the website.
This is wrong on more levels than I could possibly explain here, but I will endeavour to at least scratch the surface.
Your homepage is the most important page on your website, and for SEO it is your greatest asset. The vast majority of the external links will be pointing at your homepage, which will give it the greatest significance within Google. If you treat your homepage as nothing more than a doorway, you’ll be losing this advantage.
As Google treats your homepage with more importance than any other page on your website, your homepage will be indexed more frequently. It will be the page that gets the most coverage and exposure, therefore it should be the page that receives the most updates and the most links from within your own website. The homepage should be the central conduit from which to create your website architecture. It’s the most powerful page on your site and its power should be used to filter through to other pages on your site in order to improve your search engine rankings.
To create a doorway, or splash page, on your website you’re effectively putting up a blocking page that Google has to get past before it indexes your website.
If you want your website to rank well within the SERPs, use your home page, don’t ignore it.
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