Comments on: Design Entry Pages Not Home Pages

By: Freelance Colchester SEO

Freelance Colchester SEO — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 03:59:22 +0000

There’s a big difference between the home page and the other pages of a site in one sense – all the other pages of the site are designed, and optimised, around one particular theme. The home page, on the other hand, is neither SEO’d, nor designed around one theme – if someone arrives there first, then it means that they don’t really know what they want from your site. If they did, then they’d arrive at a deeper page, optimised for their long tail search.

By: Wynne

Wynne — Thu, 27 May 2010 23:57:51 +0000

I always have a purpose for my pages. If they don’t perform then I scrap then and keep trying new approaches until I get appropriate responses. seems to be an iterative process with me. But I am never happy until that sucker is turning out results.

Excellent point regarding not settling on tired and boring home page ideas.

By: Kristina

Kristina — Tue, 25 May 2010 19:44:10 +0000

Great post – home pages definitely serve a function. They’re great for directing people to the right place on your site. However, every other page on the site should be optimized correctly. You’re right – following landing page principles on these other pages can work nicely to keep traffic engaged. It really all just comes down to knowing how people are getting into your site, what page is their entry point, and knowing what they expect that page to offer. This is done somewhat more easily through a traditional landing page that matches up to an ad or e-mail; however, you can make great inferences by analyzing and optimizing for search as well.

By: dan barker

dan barker — Sun, 23 May 2010 12:16:43 +0000

“what should you do about the homepage?”

I did some work on a series of fairly large sites a few years ago & these were my takeaways:

1. Visitors land elsewhere, but a surprising number still use the homepage. Less web-savvy users often return to it to reorient themselves.
2. Because of that, you should include pathfinders to the content that your key visitors are most likely to be interested in.
3. It’s also a great space to use as a ‘merchandising’ area – where you place the content that *you* would most like visitors to see.
3. The kind of visitor who uses the homepage often visits it several times in a journey. Therefore adding in dynamic content can work (just as long as you keep the core navigational content the same).

Here are a couple of posts I wrote about this around the time (on a now long-abandoned blog):

http://www.omstrategy.com/59/why-you-should-challenge-common-thinking-around-homepages
http://www.omstrategy.com/62/every-page-is-now-a-homepage

Hope there’s something of interest.

dan

By: Ed

Ed — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:17:10 +0000

In reply to Paul.

Hi,

I think you miss-understand what’s being said here. I don’t believe the suggestion is to go off and build a completely new looking page in the old-school traditional sense of a landing page, but rather that the main entry points on your site have to do a lot of work.

For example, horizontal navigation across the top of your site, if well implemented, is very effective in giving people an overview of what you do as a company.

It’s this kind of thing that traditionally site owners would rely on their home page doing for them. But if users aren’t coming in from your home page then not visiting it at all you can’t rely on your home page doing that for you…

By: Dagul@Wealth Education

Dagul@Wealth Education — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:12:19 +0000

It’s the proliferation of blogs that killed the importance of homepages. Before blogs came to the internet, the homepage is the most important page in a website. But as you said, internet users now go directly to the article post and bypass the homepage.

By: Tad Chef

Tad Chef — Wed, 19 May 2010 08:00:11 +0000

I suggest reading the book Webdesign for ROI. In it the authors rightfully procalim that on any given website not the homepage is the most important part of it but the forms. Of course any page is a landing page.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 18 May 2010 18:04:39 +0000

Barry – hi!

About a year ago I went to a seminar where one of the guest speakers was from a company who provided landing pages for websites.

These landing pages were often “highly optimised”, (read into that what you will!), and often just a “buy me” page with some kind of “selling feature” to it – a product from the main website etc.

Sometimes these pages had had slots bought for them in Google so that even though they may have had a good result in “natural search”, they were almost being guaranteed a “top of the page” position in the search results.

On the downside – because they were just a “Landing/Buy me” page – they often did not look like the rest of the website they were representing. So the NEGATIVE effect of what was supposed to happen occurred, i.e. folks never bought anything off the landing page because it looked awful, and nobody was clicking through to the main website because they thought they would just see more of the same.

My own experience tells me that home pages are rarely visited because most of the searchable useful content is actually “inside” the website.

I’m still undecided on solution to this….

Paul
.-= Paul recently posted: Shepherd’s Pie Has Lamb Mince =-.