The main purpose of homepage SEO optimization is to make the website’s homepage relevant to the target keywords.
So, you need to create a keyword rich homepage for your website. Additionally, it’s important for you to optimize a website’s homepage for better conversions. That means that you need to create a website’s homepage that converts pretty well.
With a well-optimized homepage, you’ll definitely find it easy to turn your site’s visitors into prospects, real customers, sales and profits. Finally, you’ll be able to boost your sales and increase the awareness of your brand dramatically.
It’s worth noting that homepage is the main page on your website. Therefore, the homepage needs to be optimized for the most profitable keyword phrases. Such keywords are likely to generate high amounts of search traffic to a website.
Keep in mind that optimizing the homepage can be hard. However, things will get better if you follow an effective SEO strategy. If done right, homepage SEO can contribute greatly to your business success. The big question is – what are the key elements of homepage SEO optimization? Now, it’s time to get the answer to this question!
In this blog post, we’ll provide you with the most effective homepage SEO practices and tips. In other words, we’ll explain to you how to create an SEO friendly homepage on a website and get high amount of search traffic. In fact, you need to do many things in order to optimize your website’s homepage for the necessary keywords successfully.
Follow these 10 tips to develop a homepage SEO strategy that works!
1) Optimize Title and Meta Description on the Homepage
There is no question that Title and Meta description are incredibly important for website’s SEO today. You need to know that title and Meta description are used to describe the content on the web page. And of course, you need to optimize Title and Meta description for better site’s SEO.
Your job is to create SEO optimized and user friendly title and Meta description for the website’s homepage. In addition, you should aim to insert keywords that you target into homepage’s title and Meta description in a natural way. By doing this, you’ll be able to make your site’s homepage relevant to the target keywords.
2) Optimize the Content on the Website’s Homepage
Content optimization is another important stage of homepage SEO optimization. Your main goal is to provide original, easy-to-read and keyword-rich content on the website’s homepage. Plus, you should create the text for the homepage and clearly describe what your site is about. It’s crucial for you to provide the right amount of content on the website’s homepage as well.
The next question is – how many words should be on the website’s homepage? Obviously, the text on the website’s homepage doesn’t have to be short. So, you should add at least 100 words of original content to the site’s homepage. On the other hand, visitors may find it difficult to read the content on your site’s homepage if the text is too long. The word count of homepage text has to range between 100 – 1000 words.
3) Optimize Images and Videos on the Website’s Homepage
It goes without saying that your site’s homepage contains some images. Sometimes, site owners choose to provide videos on the homepage. Remember, you should do every single thing possible to make a website’s homepage more SEO friendly. Well-optimized images and videos are likely to improve your homepage SEO dramatically. It makes a lot of sense to insert keyword into file names and alt tags for better homepage SEO.
4) Optimize Your Site’s Logo for SEO
We all know that a logo is one of the key elements of the site’s homepage design. It’s also important to note that a logo can be used for improving homepage SEO. It will take you only a few minutes to optimize site’s logo for better SEO. However, a website with a well-optimized logo is likely to make a huge difference and rank higher for target keywords in search engines.
It’s worth noting that the website’s logo can be optimized for SEO in two different ways. First of all, you need to create the name of the logo’s file correctly. Logo file’s name shouldn’t be just “logo” or something like that. Make sure that logo’s file name contains the keyword that you target. Obviously, logo file’s name is short and that’s why optimizing it for several keywords can be hard. That means that you need to optimize logo’s file name for the most profitable keyword only. Plus, you need to pay a close attention to the logo’s alt tag. It would be better to create the logo’s alt tag with a target keyword. Such a logo will make your homepage relevant to the necessary keyword and help you greatly improve your site’s SEO.
5) Optimize Content on the Website’s Homepage
As it was mentioned above, you need to provide about 100 – 1000 words of original content on the website’s homepage. Additionally, you need to create homepage text that’s relevant to keyword phrases that you target.
However, keyword stuffing is something that has to be avoided at any cost. That’s why it’s so important for you to measure the density of a target keyword on a web page. The optimal density of a target keyword in the content on the homepage needs to be about 1 – 4%. Try to insert the keyword at the beginning of the text, in the body and at the end of the text.
It would be nice for you to mention a keyword phrase at the beginning, in the body and in the end of a text on the homepage. You can also diversify homepage’s text with synonyms and secondary keyword phrases to avoid keyword stuffing.
6) Optimize H1 Tags on Your Website’s Homepage
It’s a great idea to use H1 tags to add subtitles to the text on the website’s homepage. By doing so, you’ll be able to make your text more comfortable for readers. That means that you’ll not find it difficult to turn your website traffic into sales.
It’s pretty easy to read well-structured texts on the homepage, isn’t it? Another important thing that you need to be aware is that H1 tags can be used for SEO purposes. You can easily insert the necessary keywords into H1 tags to make your site’s homepage more search engine friendly. Keep in mind that properly optimized H1 tags can greatly improve your site’s SEO!
7) Improve Your Homepage Loading Speed
Numerous studies show that website load speed affects site’s SEO. If your site loads slowly, then you are likely to lose high amounts of customers. The reality is people don’t like to wait too much. They will definitely go to your competitors if your site doesn’t open within a few seconds.
As it was mentioned above, today’s SEO is all about user experience. So, you should do every single thing possible to make your site convenient for users. If your website homepage doesn’t load within 2 – 5 seconds, this will definitely have a huge negative impact on your site’s rankings. On the other hand, you’ll have more happy users if your website works fast. The faster your website works – the more happy customers your site is likely to have. More happy users mean better user experience and better user experience means higher search engine rankings.
Does it take your site’s homepage too long to load? It’s fair to say that a slow loading website is a big problem for SEO. And of course, this type of problem needs to be fixed as soon as possible. The first thing you need to do is to figure out what exactly has a negative impact on your site load speed.
Actually, there are many ways to decrease page load time and speed up your website. For example, it makes a lot of sense to optimize all of images on site’s web pages. There is no doubt that your site will load faster if all of your images are well-optimized. Your website may also have PHP scripts that consume a lot of resources. When such scripts are running, your website will definitely work slowly. Such an issue needs to be addressed to a website developer. If done right, website speed optimization will contribute greatly to your SEO strategy.
8) Optimize Your Website’s Homepage for Mobile Devices
As you probably know, the global mobile traffic has already surpassed the global desktop traffic. It’s also important to note that the global mobile traffic is rapidly growing. That means that having a mobile friendly site is not a trend anymore, it’s already the necessity.
Developing a mobile friendly website has to be the number one priority for every business owner. If users can’t load your website’s homepage on their mobile devices, then they will probably choose to go to the competitor’s websites and then buy their products or services. As a result, your business will lose your customers as well as sales and profits.
It’s also important to note that having a mobile friendly website is very important for SEO. The reality is Google and other search engines tend to award mobile friendly sites. That means that a mobile friendly site has a better chance to rank high for targeted keywords these days. It goes without saying that you’ll be able to improve your site’s SEO significantly if you make your website mobile friendly.
9) Add a Blog to a Website and Update It with Keyword Rich Articles
Let’s assume that you would like your site’s homepage to rank high for certain keyword. If this is the case, we would recommend you to create as many web pages on your site relevant to this keyword as possible. Additionally, each of these web pages needs to be linked to the website’s homepage. This is something that helps make your site’s homepage relevant to the keyword that you target.
There is no better way to create web pages with relevant content than to add a blog to a site. Setup a blog on your website and publish articles on it. However, it’s crucial for you to provide the right type of content on your blog. Make sure that you blog content is original, interesting and easy-to-read. It would be nice to publish content on a blog on a regular basis. Above all, you need to link your blog posts to the site’s homepage where it’s possible.
And of course, you should make your blog posts relevant to the keyword that you target on the site’s homepage. However, that doesn’t mean that you need to insert the keyword into a blog post as many times as possible. Each time you insert a keyword into a blog post you need to ensure that it looks and sounds naturally.
10) Attract Backlinks to Website’s Homepage
Don’t forget that site’s rankings still depend a lot on site’s incoming links. Developing backlinks for a website has to be a key part of your SEO strategy. However, the quality of backlinks matters. That’s why link building is something that always needs to be taken seriously.
You should aim to attract relevant and permanent backlinks to your website’s homepage. It’s important to know that this type of backlinks look natural and, most importantly, they are good for site’s SEO. Make sure that your site is not getting a lot of incoming links within a short period of time. If these kinds of happen, search engines may begin to suspect that you are buying links for a website.
Links that look spammy are likely to affect site’s SEO negatively. So, it would be nice for you to attract links to your homepage naturally. Focus on the best natural link building methods such as guest posting, photo sharing, forum promotion, creating a network of relevant sites, etc. These link building methods are safe and effective.
Do you want to create a SEO friendly homepage for your website? Or, maybe, you would like to improve your homepage SEO? Contact us today! We at Finepoint Design are always looking forward to helping you with any of your homepage SEO needs!
Now that you have your home page optimized, check out these other great SEO article to learn more ways to optimize your website:
5 Ways Your SEO Can Benefit From Responsive Web Design