When you are talking about a successful website, the first page people land on, the homepage, plays a very special role. This is exactly where users form their first impression of the company and what it offers. You could compare a homepage to a big shop window that tells visitors and customers why they should look at your products and invites them inside for a closer look. Statistics say most users enter a site through a subpage rather than the homepage. That does not make the homepage any less important, because on their second visit they will come to it. The homepage is the main entrance from which people fan out to your products and services.
Homepages matter a little less today than they did in the 2000s. The main reason is that the culture of finding websites has moved from directory logic to search engine logic.
What Is a Homepage?
A home page is the first and central page of a website, the one from which you can reach every other subpage. For example, the URL https://www.turksem.com takes you to the Türk SEM homepage. Other terms for it are index page, front page or simply Home. In everyday speech, people also use “homepage” to mean the whole website, subpages and all.
The Homepage Link in Today’s Menus
Lately a good number of major portals have removed the homepage link from their main menus.
(Where it exists) the label commonly used on Turkish sites: Anasayfa
(Where it exists) the label commonly used on English language sites: Home
The SEO Difference Between the Homepage and Subpages
| SEO element | Homepage | Subpages |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword focus | Broader, brand led | More specific, topic led |
| Content length | Usually shorter, a summary | Usually longer, detailed |
| Internal links | Mostly pointing to other pages | Links to other content on the topic |
| External links | Fewer, selective | More, to sources on the topic |
| Meta title | Brand name up front | Focused on a specific topic or product |
| Meta description | Reflects the overall purpose of the site | Summarizes what is on the page |
| H1 tag | Usually the brand name or a tagline | The main subject of the page |
| URL structure | Root domain (e.g. www.turksem.com) | Subdirectories (e.g. www.turksem.com/seo) |
| How much page speed matters | Critical (first impression) | Important, but not as critical as the homepage |
| Mobile friendliness | Extremely important | Important, but not as critical as the homepage |
| Social sharing | Shared more often | Usually shared less |
| Conversion focus | Site wide navigation and introduction | Selling a specific product or service, or generating leads |
Why the Homepage Matters in Online Marketing
How much does the homepage matter in online marketing? It is your most important page. That becomes obvious once you look at the jobs it has to do. Even when internet users land somewhere else first, they can come back to the homepage to get a sense of what the website is about and who is behind it. Here is what the homepage is responsible for:
- Arousing curiosity
- Introducing the company, the person, the brand and so on
- Giving a reason to visit a subpage
- Putting the most important subjects up front and stating your benefits clearly
- Giving an overview
- Being the place where the mission is felt
A well built homepage holds the most important information brought together in a single view. For a user to feel spoken to, you have to know your target group properly and take them into account. We covered this before with the definition of a persona in our piece on what user experience is, and you may want to read that one too.
What should appear on the homepage varies a great deal depending on your site’s goal, on awareness and on your campaigns. Your reading of the homepage will change with whatever your company is aiming at in that period.
Good homepage content looks like meaningful headings and short, clear copy with well placed calls to action, written in plain language. A mix of media such as images, info boxes, graphic elements and even a company video makes the homepage nicer to look at and gives it variety.
The Homepage’s Basic Job: Direct People and Give Them an Overview
As a rule the user should be able to work out from the homepage which subpage to go to and should immediately grasp what kind of website this is. The first impression counts for a lot, and the attention internet users give you is very limited, often put at around 8 seconds. So both the design and the structure of the homepage have to be convincing. It matters enormously that the page is user friendly, easy to understand, easy to navigate, quick to get visitors to the information they came for, and rich enough to keep them on the site longer.
We should point out that load time is also a very important variable in whether the homepage gets visited at all.
The Sensible Move: Use Only Internal Links on the Homepage
Internal and external links are an important part of search engine optimization. Alongside links coming in from the outside, internal links matter a great deal too. Pointing to your most important subpages from the homepage in particular is a good idea. Internal links make content easier to find, for users and for search engines alike. The homepage, as we said a moment ago, is an important page. The subpages you put in its upper region, in what we call the hot spot, should be your most important pages.
The SEO tools we built for our clients are open to everyone, and one of them, the external and internal link checker, will scan your site for free.
Search engine crawlers trust links, which makes linked pages easier to find. Having your pages sit in the sitemap alone is often not enough.
We can take that further: the page you link to most from your own site is your most important page. When you use internal links, the relevant keywords you use should also appear on the target page. Using them that way makes it easier to understand where a link goes and what it is about. Be careful, though: internal links should always serve a purpose and be used sensibly rather than piling on needless weight.
Everything in moderation, and used properly.
5 Things Not to Do on a Homepage
Here are a few examples of mistakes people make on homepages, and what is best avoided.
- A confusing, overloaded homepage does nobody any good. It should be neither less than it needs nor more. Some SEO specialists know how much the homepage link counts, so they place almost every link they have on it. That can tip into over optimization, and worse, it can slow your site down badly.
- Do not use external links. The user came to your website and should stay there. Having them click straight through to another site does not work in your favor.
- Leaving the H1 off the homepage, or filling it with empty phrases like “Welcome”, is a wasted opportunity. Say right away what this is about. Some sites put Welcome in the H1, which can create a semantic error in SEO terms. Of course the visitor is welcome on your site, you do not need to write it.
- Homepage content should not be dull or repeat itself. It helps for it to be high quality and suited to the target audience.
- Neglecting mobile optimization is not a good idea. Plenty of users search on their phones or tablets these days, so the homepage has to be designed responsively as well.
- The homepage is where user experience matters most.
Conclusion
The homepage has to arouse curiosity first, then inform, then point people well toward the important parts of the site. The content should be user focused and original. Do not leave these off your homepage:
- Internal links to your most important subpages
- A good site structure and easy navigation
- A mention of your campaigns and offers
- Relevant keywords, and none of the irrelevant ones
- The shortest load time the page can manage
- Contact details and calls to action
Bonus: Advice for International Sites
Run your site’s speed test from our SEO tools page and see how many seconds it takes to load in each country. Testing Turksem.com from San Francisco, United States gave us these results.
Running the same test from Frankfurt, Germany gave us this.
The closer you get to Istanbul, the physical location where the site is hosted, the more the gap closes. If your site serves the United Kingdom, remember that it should be hosted in a data center based in the United Kingdom.
