Friday, September 16, 2005
Redesigning your Home Page: Best Practices
We all go through it, a redesign of our Web site. Maybe it's just the homepage to present a new "look and feel". Maybe you want to make it more "search engine friendly". Regardless you need to consider a couple of factors.
First, put yourself in place of a potential visitor to your site. Are they able to identify, from the home page, exactly where they need to click to find what they are looking for. Or is it cluttered with too much stuff that they get confused. Planning a strategy for the different type of users and where you want them to go is a good idea. For instance, homepage-->product info/catalog --> order product/store locator. Design the information so that a user naturally follows your strategy.
Second is internal links. Because the search engine place a high importance on links (or "votes") to your Website, home pages naturally have a higher page rank. Your homepage can transfer some of this page rank to pages it links to within your Web site. So having good links to relevant pages within your site will help their pages rank higher. The more clicks away from the homepage the less value they carry over. So a page that takes 4 links from the homepage will have much less value than a page that is one click away.
There needs to be a balance. Having links to every page on your site on your homepage is not the answer. It will look too cluttered and visitors will not know where to start. A sitemap that is one click away from your homepage is a good idea since it does have links to all pages of your site.
So a good linking strategy will help increase page rank and a good usability strategy will help convert those visitors into customers. They go hand in hand.
Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization
First, put yourself in place of a potential visitor to your site. Are they able to identify, from the home page, exactly where they need to click to find what they are looking for. Or is it cluttered with too much stuff that they get confused. Planning a strategy for the different type of users and where you want them to go is a good idea. For instance, homepage-->product info/catalog --> order product/store locator. Design the information so that a user naturally follows your strategy.
Second is internal links. Because the search engine place a high importance on links (or "votes") to your Website, home pages naturally have a higher page rank. Your homepage can transfer some of this page rank to pages it links to within your Web site. So having good links to relevant pages within your site will help their pages rank higher. The more clicks away from the homepage the less value they carry over. So a page that takes 4 links from the homepage will have much less value than a page that is one click away.
There needs to be a balance. Having links to every page on your site on your homepage is not the answer. It will look too cluttered and visitors will not know where to start. A sitemap that is one click away from your homepage is a good idea since it does have links to all pages of your site.
So a good linking strategy will help increase page rank and a good usability strategy will help convert those visitors into customers. They go hand in hand.
Category: Search Engine Marketing and Optimization
posted by Symetri at 9/16/2005 11:36:00 PM 
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