SEO for a Home Page

The truth is, you can't do much SEO for a home page, not really.

What this means is that the home page itself, covering as it does a variety of subjects, can't be focussed enough on any one of them to rank well purely because of on-page factors for any one of them.

An optimised page will normally have a title, h1 tag and copy focussed around one or maybe two phrases at the most. What people expect to see from a homepage though is the same as they would from the cover of a normal three-dimensional glossy brochure. When they type in your domain name they expect the home page to look like the company brochure, you know, big graphic of the company name, big splash graphic text about the company's core business and links to details of most aspects of what the company does. It's a hangover from three-dimensional physical thinking as opposed to cyber-space thinking. This doesn't have to be a bad thing if you're a small company as no doubt everything you do can be described in semantically related terms, but if you're a whacking great company with interests in diverse areas then that probably won't be the case. So, these days, I don't worry too much about SEO for the home page.

While a physical brochure may only have one cover, and thus a single front page, an online brochure may have as many front pages, as many covers if you will, as you please. Effectively any page can be optimised for a search term and so be the page from the site that turns up in the SERPS in a search for that term. Thus, on a site about widgets, the page optimised for "blue widgets" will be the first page from the site to turn up in the SERPS for the phrase blue widgets and to anyone searching for the term that's the page that will effectively function as the cover for the online brochure because, I say again, it will be the first page that they view.

It may well actually rank highly for one of them, but that will be due to the anchor text in incoming links. Anyway, those incoming links shouldn't all be going to your home page. This is a web site, where every page is potentially the front page for some aspect of your business, so related links should ideally be going to related pages.

While there are obvious exceptions, like the "Contact Us" page for example, in general you have to treat almost every page as if it were your seo home page.