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Based on an analysis I just conducted limited to the category I compete in, the Google algo, which orginally focused on links has been turned upside down, and is now giving more weight to content than to links. However, I doubt the depth of content matters as much as how directly it relates to visitor's quiries. Will your site provide the best source of content related to your targetted keywords?

I am going to close out the conversation by thanking the respondents and admitting that I was wrong, wrong, wrong. Google's current rankings for the most competitive keywords in my niche have become highly correlated with the sites that have the most comprehensive text. In my opinion, it is providing a skewed result, as many viewers of fashion sites ignore the text, but there is not much sense in fighting the algo. The algo isn't smart enough yet to be able to judge great photography.

My previous response makes a bit more sense if I added the word "fashion" in front of the word designer in the first sentence. I totally agree that letting "web" or "graphic' designers make final decisions about web pages is a deadly mistake. However, when developing for a fashion house and the fashion designer is also paying the bills, his opinion counts for a lot, even if it is lousy SEO. On a anecdotal note, one of the most competitive terms in the fashion industry in "wedding dresses". The top ranked designer site has a lot of text in their links, but virtually no other textual content. So here is an anecdotal example that text content is not necessary to rank well for a fashion site. However, it is obviously foolhardy to give a lot of weight to a single example that may just be an exception to the rule.

Many designers, who ultimately approve the design of their sites, would disagree with your opinion. A couple of examples of sites with minimal text on the home page are, marcjacobs.com and versace.com. Obviously, the fact that there are examples of sites with home pages with minimal text does not mean it it appropriate, maybe just the in way to go. But then again, being on trend is everything in the fashion industry

Getting ready to launch a completely redesigned site for a fashion designer. Since it is a fashion site, visitors do not need text to describe what the site is about., We are weighing three options: 1) clean design with no text (just images and navigational links), 2) bolting on a couple of sentences of text at the bottom of the page to signal keyword terms to the search engines, 3) following the lead of the top ranking site in the category and adding lots of text to the bottom of the page.

Do the SEO benefits justify cluttering up the design by bolting text onto the bottom of the home page, and if so, how many characters of text seem to be the minimum to be effective?

I agree with the previous responses that the blog should probably be a subsection. A key question to ask is whether the blog will attract links either naturally or through a link building program.  A blog that stands a change of obtaining significant traffic and links, and features content that is independent from the main website is a candidate for a root level domain. However, from your brief descriiption, this does not seem to be the case with your blog