Contact form on home page.
-
I am looking to add a contact form onto my home page and I was wondering if it made sense to change my index.html to an index.php.
If i do make this change, would it have any impact on my search rankings?
-
If you don't mind doing a little coding you could try this simple contact form
http://css-tricks.com/nice-and-simple-contact-form/
There are other options out there for a full blown contact form from MailChimp et al, although many seem to be trying to get money for what is essentially a really basic thing.
Mail Chimp or Constant Contact is good if all you want is basic email capture, with Mail Chimp offering free services under 2000 subscribers, although it does include a mail chimp link or small logo.
If you Google "html contact form" you'll get lots of options. Personally I would go with Chris Coyier's option above and include his spam options.
If you dont need to change from html to php I would'nt do it. 301s are great but when I changed a site from html with a 301 it didnt pass all the link juice and there was a slight drop in traffic, plus it stop you needlessly complicating it.
If you need help in setting it up let me know
-
you don't believe it increases the chance a person will fill in the contact page? I'm trying to increase my conversion rates.
-
It's a basic site.
-
I would not put a contact form on the homepage, maybe a link to the contact page.
-
Depending on the platform and depending on the contact form you either dont need php, or you can just output html files with an SEO/SEF plugin.
Is it a basic site or one with a cms?
-
Would it also help if Joel put a canonical on the new index.php page?
-
I'm a big fan of putting some kind of contact form or at least a call-to-action on every single page of your site, so great idea. Anyways, that's not your question, so if you need to switch to index.php in order for your form to work, then go ahead and do so. But make sure you 301 redirect index.html to index.php since search engines will consider them to be two different pages. I am assuming your site is hosted on a Linux server with access to .htaccess so you should be able to accomplish this by adding the following lines to the .htaccess -
RewriteEngine on RewriteRule index\.html index.php [NC,R]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are slides how's etc the new Splash Pages?
[How did Moz know that my question was about this?!] I've just completed an audit of nearly 50 websites in the tourism industry and 90% had a slideshow, large image or video taking up more than the initial screen on the fairly large screened Chromebook that I'm using. I'm advising them all to ditch this and am often getting resistance from the site owners and their web developers. I know that these can be better optimized for page load speed, which is poor for most of these sites, especially on mobile devices; but from a usability standpoint, are these affective at drawing in users? Do users take the time to view these? Are they annoyed at always having to scroll down to see if there is anything else useful on the homepage? I think they are like the splash pages of the past: poor for usability and SEO. I've advised to at least make sure that the images are sized so the top of the page fits any screen (some of them do resize well for mobile devices, but maybe not laptops/desktops), include text with calls to action and click through to relevant content. I've been noting that they aren't media businesses selling images or videos, so they need to get their offerings to the top of the page so that users can see and engage more quickly. Anyone have any stats or experience on this? Thanks, Ann
Web Design | | anndonnelly0 -
When rel canonical tag used, which page does Google considers for ranking and indexing? A/B test scenario!
Hi Moz community, We have redesigned our website and launched for A/B testing using canonical tags from old website to new website pages, so there will be no duplicate content issues and new website will be shown to the half of the website visitors successfully to calculate the metrics. However I wonder how actually Google considers it? Which pages Google will crawl and index to consider for ranking? Please share your views on this for better optimisation. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Business Services via Index Page or Dedicated Pages?
We're in the process of building a new website for our Business (B2B Event Services) and we've hit a design snag. Our designer wants to combine all of our business services information (there are six service lines) into a single Index Page titled "Services". Beyond this creating a needlessly long page to scroll through, I'm worried this will negatively impact our ability to SEO for each service line, as we wouldn't have any intention of letting people visit the individual pages from within the site. Our current site features individual pages which, in my opinion, is how we should build our new site. That being said, I'm completely open to any ideas that will further enhance usability and searchability. Any clarification would be greatly appreciated!
Web Design | | SHWorldwide1 -
Dead end pages are really an issue?
Hi all, We have many pages which are help guides to our features. These pages do not have anymore outgoing links (internal / external). We haven't linked as these are already 4th level pages and specific about particular topic. So these are technically dead end pages. Do these pages really hurt us? We need to link to some other pages? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Google result showing old Meta Title / Description even though page view source shows new info.
Hey guys! I'm struggling with why Google is ignoring my Meta Title / Description. I made a pretty drastic change to both about a week ago and on the results it hasn't changed. I'm on first page with several keywords and I think this weird caching is hurting me on where I'm at on the page. Thoughts / Ideas?
Web Design | | curtis_williams0 -
Sites went from page 1 to page 40 + in results
Hello all We are looking for any insight we can get as to why all (except 1) of our sites were effected very badly in the rankings by Google since the Panda updates. Several of our sites londonescape.com dublinescape.com and prague, paris, florence, delhi, dubai and a few others (all escape.com urls) have had major drop in their rankings. LondonEscape.net (now.com (changed after rank drop) ), was ranked between 4th & 6th but is now down around 400th and DelhiEscape.net and MunichEscape.com were both number 1 for several years for our main key words We also had two Stay sites number 1 , AmsterdamStay and NewYorkstay both .com ranked number 1 for years , NewYork has dropped to 10th place so far the Amsterdam site has not been effected. We are not really sure what we did wrong. MunichEscape and DelhiEcape should never have been page 1 sites ) just 5 pages and a click thru to main site WorldEscape) but we never did anything to make them number 1. London, NewYork and Amsterdam sites have had regular new content added, all is checked to make sure its original. **Since the rankings drop ** LondonEscape.com site We have redirected the.net to the .com url Added a mountain of new articles and content Redesigned the site / script Got a fair few links removed from sites, any with multiple links to us. A few I have not managed yet to get taken down. So far no result in increased rankings. We contacted Google but they informed us we have NOT had a manual ban imposed on us, we received NO mails from Google informing us we had done anything wrong. We were hoping it would be a 6 month ban but we are way past that now. Anyone any ideas ?
Web Design | | WorldEscape0 -
Best layout pages for SEO
Dear all, what would be the ideal layout of a webpage for SEO? How would a homepage and landingspage look like? Thanks in advance! Best regards, Ben
Web Design | | HMK-NL0 -
Google Penalizing Websites that Have Contact Forms at Top of Website Page?
Has anyone else heard of Google penalizing websites for having their contact forms located at the top of the website? For example http://www.austintenantadvisors.com/ Look forward to hearing other thoughts on this.
Web Design | | webestate1