Keyword text block on homepage - keep or do away with?
-
One of my sites is getting a major refresh on the home page, which is good and bad.
The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. Yuck.
The revamped homepage is much improved. Very short, visual, fast, and SEO optimized. It's more of launching pad into the rest of the site. But, the text in the body is much less, perhaps a 100 words or so.
The worry is that with so little text, matching the target kw count will appear as stuffing. The 'solution' was to include a visible text box at the bottom of the page, with about 300 words, basically what would typically appear in an 'about' section of a site. But instead, its located on the bottom of the homepage to beef up the pages content, and to avoid looking too 'stuffed'.
Visually, its unattractive IMHO and while the text is good and informative, its under the fold and will likely not change that much going forward. This all seems very 10 years ago to me, but I'd like a second opinion.
Is this box of text a good strategy?
-
Sounds like you are agreeing with me, Ryan.
As I mentioned, if you go overboard with "optimizing" you end up having a site that is not linkable or attractive enough for other people to link to you naturally, so although you will get traffic for using the keyword rich content, title, etc, you are getting it at the cost of future links. That's lacking a long term strategy.
I would never link to a website that looked too keywordy or spammy even if it wasn't one and I am confident there are many others like me.That being said - if you have smaller "satellite" sites, and those sites are meant to cater to a specific niche and their main objective is to get traffic to your main website rather than create new leads/sales on their own, then its a different story - I would go for optimizing first in this case. I would make sure most keywords that I care for are covered. User experience is still important (or they'll bounce) but not as much as it is for your main MOTHER site.
-
I disagree Syed.
Google wants the best user experience. They have billions of dollars riding on providing the best user experience. The challenge is that sometimes webmasters believe their judgement on the best user experience is better then Google's.
I would suggest that whenever there is a conflict between what you feel would be the best user experience and what Google rewards, do serious research on the subject. Could Google be wrong? Absolutely. It is more likely that the webmaster or SEO might be mistaken.
EGOL's suggestion is perfect. He continuously modified his site over time to ensure the best user experience. In the end he wound up with a home page design that wasn't what he expected, but that user's love. The result is a great user experience AND great results from Google.
-
Ask yourself this - is Google traffic of utmost importance or does user experience what matters most?
Its a vicious cycle.. if you "over optimize" your website, you may initially rank higher but will become less "linkable" to other resources. Also, it may get stunted or even bowled over by competition who converts much better than you.
I always go for user experience first unless my site couldn't live without organic traffic
-
**The legacy homepage was very long, and had a lot of text (thousands+ of words) in the body, with about 450+ links (internal/external) on the page. A ton of graphics, etc etc. **
This sounds like the homepage of my site... I started out with a small homepage like you describe and then added a little more to it and visitor engagement went up.... added a little more and visitor engagement went up... added more and visitor engagement went up....
Now my homepage looks like the latimes.com. The actions of my visitors are hard to argue with.
-
Tough one. While I do see the value of having some added text, it also seems very 'engine targeted' rather than 'user targeted'. Is there any value in this for the users? If there isn't, could you try to improve the text so that it is? If the sole purpose of this text is to please the engines, I might consider getting rid of it, otherwise it is a nice sub-fold semi-useful piece of text for both users and engines and I would keep it.
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
-
How Good or Bad is having a blog feed(s) on the homepage?
Hello everyone, I was wondering if I can get some different opinion about having a blog feed on the homepage. Image, title, excerpt I have several feeds on mine which I do not believe it hurts and has helped my rankings but I wanted some superior SEO brains to weigh in. https://www.brightvessel.com Is it good for SEO? When would it be bad? How many posts would be considered too much? On my blog, have the most recent posts which have some of the same feeds. Which is making me question the duplicated content. https://www.brightvessel.com/blog/ Thanks! Judd
On-Page Optimization | | brightvessel0 -
Login Page Outranking Homepage
Hi all, I have a subscription based website with a members login. For our branded terms, this login page is outranking the homepage and we're unsure what, if anything to do about it. One suggestion was to deindex it, but the counter-argument was that we'd be taking away one of our spots on the first page. I feel from a user experience, it would be best to deindex it to try and get the homepage ranked #1 since the login page not optimised towards new visitors. Another suggestion was to just optimise the title and description to make it look a little nicer. I would love to hear your thoughts Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | CupidTeam0 -
How many keywords for home page?
I am a close up magician based in the UK and have just signed up for Moz Analytics and looking through the info now. The first issue was that it says my home page had an F grade for "table magician" My home page is not really optimised for table magician but Moz is suggesting I do. So my question is do I go with Moz and adjust my home page to match even though I have a dedicated page for table magician. Is this title tag for the home page too much. Roger Lapin: Wedding Magician - Close up Magician - Table Magician ?? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | rnperki
Roger
http://www.rogerlapin.co.uk0 -
Keyword density or No. of Time keyword used
Now, I know that there is no set figure to be used here, whichever metric you are using and it will depend on the article and what is natural. However, lets suppose for a minute that we are taking a keyword in isolation, and I have a 2000 word article using the keyword 17 times and rank no. 3 in Google SERPS. The no. 1 slot uses the keyword 8 times but only has a 800 word article and only a B grade on the onpage ranker. Of course, there are off page factors as well, but just wondering what your thoughts are on whether you look at density or total keyword usage. It is easy to just write without think about keyword density or usage, but occasionally you end up using the keyword about 50 times, and it is then I have to actually think about it. Other articles I barely use the keyword because the article just writes itself and it works out fine, but these are generally shorter. With longer articles on my best converting pages, I can't help but think about it more and it ends up a little hit and miss.
On-Page Optimization | | TheWebMastercom1 -
Keyword/phrase proximity
I'm curious about opinions regarding how the search algorithms treat multiple key phrases that may reside in one long tail key phrase. So for example: If I'm optimizing for "New York Litigation Lawyer", would that also give me rankings for "New York Lawyer"? My thought is that the former will be considered the primary keyword and rankings will improve mostly for that, but that the latter keyword could also possibly see some lift as well. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | nickturner9221 -
Keyword placement on home page or throughout the website
OK, I find the courage to ask this because there is not supposed to be a dumb question. Like all of us, I want my website to rank great with a particular keyword. Do I have to use this keyword only on my home page (the start page which I want to appear on top Google results), or does it make a difference if I use the keyword on several articles that I post on my website. These articles all have seperate links. Eg i want the www.website.com to be found by Google, but this website contains www.website.com/link1.html, www.website.com/link2.html.. etc. Will keyword usage on link1.html, link2.html etc be relevant so that www.website.com is found by Google? Or is every single page for itself? Hope I have explained that well and I would really appreciate your feedback.
On-Page Optimization | | polyniki0 -
301 redirect and then keywords in URL
Hi, Matt Cutts says that 301 redirects, including the ones on internal pages, causes the loss of a little bit of link juice. But also, I know that keywords in the URL are very important. On our site, we've got unoptimized URLs (few keywords) in the internal pages. Is it worth doing a 301 redirect in order to optimize the URLs for each main page. 301 redirects are the only way we can do it on our premade cart For example (just an example) say our main (1 of the 4) keywords for the page is "brown shoes". I'm wondering if I should redirect something like shoes.com/shoecolors.html to shoes.com/brown-shoes.html In other words, with the loss of juice would we come out ahead? In what instances would we come out ahead?
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Does a scrolling text area carry juice?
I'm seeing a lot of companies in my industry loading the homepage with text by using a scrolling text area. Do the search engines see this as valid text or is it a cloaking method that carries less weight?
On-Page Optimization | | LabadieAuto0