Writing Your Homepage Content – How Much Is Enough?

A few years ago, introducing your targeted keywords and pumping the meta-data on the homepage was enough to optimize a website sufficiently to attain a decent ranking in the SERP. However, as you probably noticed, things are a bit more complicated nowadays.

An efficiently optimized homepage according to today’s standards implies having a suitable and well-researched page title, actual written content, anchor text and other important on-page characteristics, in this precise order.

In the following article, I want to talk to you about the importance of having written content on the page, how much written content should your visitors find and the common content traps to avoid. Let’s begin by presenting Google’s position on the matter.

What does Google say?

Google left this aspect in a blur since they did not give any numbers, but rather talked generally about the topic. According to Matt Cutts, the more content you have on the homepage, the more text is there for the bots to find. Essentially, from this statement, you can understand that you have absolute freedom on what you put on the homepage.

However, while it may seem like a good idea at first, having advertisement agencies, PR consultants and an internet marketing team – to name a few of the professional who can work on the homepage – will generate conflicts and hence, lead to bad user experience.

Here is my opinion on the matter: written content along with web design and media represent the embodiment of sales. Since web design and media files are not always very intuitive and may confuse the user on what the site is all about, written content can be used to clarify this matter.

Is there an optimal word count for the homepage?

This is a rather tricky question, as the optimal word count for the homepage – and any other page for that matter – will depend on other factors as well. An explanation that can clarify things further is that search engines look for indicators concerning the relevance of a keyword, including the number and quality of the sites that link back to your website. From this point of view, we can agree that a lower word count is acceptable on homepages of websites that are recognized as an authority in their niche.

On the other hand, the homepages that have yet to achieve a significant amount of inbound links, I believe that a presentation of the site comprising of about 400 to 600 words is indicated. The reason for this is that users who are looking for your products and services also need want to learn more about you. In regards to what the homepage content should refer to, I suggest you identify the questions your target audience has and provide information rich answers. This approach works optimally for search engine bots as well.

Splash pages

Some webmasters are trying to reinvent the wheel and decide to place the homepage deeper in the site’s hierarchy. However, as any SEO professional will tell you, viewers don’t like this type of surprises and chances are a new visitor will leave your site just because he did not manage to find what he was looking for fast and effortlessly.

The bottom line is that if it’s not broken, then don’t fix it! Users expect to see a homepage when they click on your website and this is precisely what you should deliver.

Looking beyond word count

The whole idea behind SEO is that you need to create sufficient relevant content for your products/services in order to alert the search engines that your words are pertinent for the customers typing them in the query. From this perspective, your homepage has the greatest out-of-the box SEO value.

In the lights of the recent Penguin update from Google, it is also important to note that the written content you have on the homepage is relevant for the readers, regardless of how small it is. The internet is full of websites with homepages filled with pictures or other media files and written content with zero readability, which incorporates numerous hyperlinks and basically says nothing.

If you are tempted to try this on your own site’s homepage, then you not only risk losing customers and chances are… you will be penalized by the search engines as well.

Chad enjoys blogging about SEO and one of his latest interests is to write about the importance of word count in SEO content.