Best Practices to Create SEO Friendly Homepage to Boost your Business

Posted on 8 Mar at 4:56 am

“Is Homepage SEO crucial for websites, or can it be safely ignored?”

This is one of the most common questions asked by clients when they connect with digital marketing agencies for marketing campaigns. The homepage is the page on a brand’s website which gets the most number of backlinks and is the most powerful as well.

In most cases, it is often the first page visitors of a website see, especially for corporate organisations. It is also one of the pages users visits even if they land on any other page of the website.

A blog, a corporate website, or an e-commerce store- every brand requires an SEO friendly Homepage to drive traffic to their website and get high rankings on the SERPs. So, if you are looking for some tips and tricks to optimise your website’s homepage into an SEO friendly homepage, here are a few things you may consider-

Optimise the Homepage Title

One of the ways to develop an SEO friendly homepage is by optimising your home page title. Do not just use your business or brand’s name as your homepage title. Instead, try to be more creative by giving search engines and users more information about the website’s main focus.

Make use of all 60 characters that you have at your disposal to craft a homepage title. Utilise all your creative abilities to blend keywords and business information in one sentence. Here are some of the rules you may follow-

a) Do not just use your brand’s name. Include high ranking keywords that represent your business or its website.
b) Ensure placing the target keywords at the beginning of the title.
c) Do not stuff keywords and confuse Google
d) Add domain or business name at the beginning of the title

Optimise the Description of your Homepage

Apart from the title, the meta description is also important while building an SEO-friendly homepage. As descriptions give the first expression of your business and its services, it is important for you to give them a thought.

However, you should also know that Google may not choose to show your description and use their own. This happens when your description is either too short ( i.e. less than 130 characters) or too long ( i.e. more than 154 characters). It may also happen when your meta description includes a lot of keywords.

Therefore, meta descriptions should always be catchy and as per the requirements.

Optimise the H1 Tag

After optimising the title and meta description, you now need to lay your focus on the H1tag.

Make sure every page of your brand’s website ( including the homepage) should have only one H1 tag. You can find the H1 tag at the top of the page, and there the various themes configured to display the page title enclosed in H1 tags.

Moreover, if you have a choice for setting the H1 tag for your SEO friendly homepage, ensure including some relatable keywords.

Homepage Image SEO

In order to make a creative and attractive homepage, you need to add some images. Not only do these images make your page less boring, but make the message for your website’s visitors more obvious.

Talking in terms of SEO, images are used to give a signal to search engine crawlers about the content on your website.

When you use images to make an SEO friendly homepage, ensure –

a) To set an ALT text ( inclusive of keywords) to describe the image
b) Set the image apart from the text. This is because search engines cannot read texts embedded in jpg or png.

Optimise your Logo

To stand apart from other websites, make sure your website has a unique and creative logo. To optimise your brand’s logo, you can-

a) Make sure that the image filename has your website’s name.
b) Include your website’s name in your ALT text

Content SEO

An SEO-friendly homepage should contain content that search engines can read and understand. Your homepage should have three variations:

a) Details of the company, images and links to the internal pages of the website
b) For an e-commerce store, the website’s homepage should show their latest products, offers, news and links to product sections.
c) For portals or blogs, The website homepage will typically display new latest blogs or feature articles.

Regardless of the type of business or home page style you choose, ensure that there is enough text content on the homepage. Moreover, the text content should include target keywords and variations.

Loading Speed of Homepage

It is a fact that most users leave a page or website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. So, even if you have a creative homepage but with a slow loading speed, you will lose visits to your website and your potential or existing customers.

Check Mobile Friendliness of your Homepage

As per research, more than 50% of the research on the SERPS take place from mobile devices. This makes it all the more important to have a mobile-friendly homepage for your brand’s website.

Google uses a slightly different algorithm for mobile websites. However, their basic SEO configurations, such as titles, description, and H1, are still the same for desktops and mobile devices.

Therefore, for a mobile-friendly homepage, you need to run the mobile-friendly test and fix errors, if any.

Moreover, it is also important to have different content for mobile and desktop homepages. Having the same content for mobile and desktop homepage will give mixed signals to Google and confuse it.

Use a responsive design for your website so that any fixes you do for your desktop are also available for mobile.

SEO is a vast field. And to drive results, it is recommended to connect with a digital marketing agency that can help you with the same. We at New Vision Digital are experienced experts. Feel free to call or drop an email to know more about our offerings and obtain a customised plan for your business.