In my last post I gave some simple tips on how you can improve the initial perception of your homepage. In this post I would like to dig a bit deeper into the content and how you can optimize it for findability and its overall effectiveness.

Make Your Homepage Easy to Find!

Your Homepage is useless if people can’t find it and once they have they need to be able to find the content, product, or service they are looking for just as easily. Unfortunately a lot of small and large businesses get this wrong when it comes to their Homepage. They simply don’t invest enough time and money into making sure that their site has been developed to encourage Human Beings to find their site. Part of this problem lies with the people Developing it. The fact is a large majority of Web Design companies around today still don’t understand the full concept of findability or they are too lazy to bother with it. They develop the site for search engines and then think their job is done. But SEO is only a part of the whole picture. Your site needs to be designed for people first and search engines last. It needs to embrace coding and design techniques that are customer oriented and specifically geared towards your target audience. If your site doesn’t get that right than all the SEO in the world is useless. You’ll get traffic, but it won’t convert.

So how exactly do you optimize your site for findability? You need to put yourself in the shoes of your customers looking for your product and ask yourself “Is this the kind of content they want to see”? This kind of thinking is critical in order to have a successful web site.

It’s All About Content Baby!

Your Homepage needs to have Rich Compelling Content that is worth someones effort to find. Brochure style web sites aren’t going to work anymore if they ever really did. Notice the change in thinking here. It’s not about helping people find your site with key words…It’s about giving people a darn good reason to find your site to begin with. The kind of impact this approach can have is a thousand times more efficient than just paying a few hundred bucks to optimize your site for some key words. I really can’t stress this enough. There are millions of Web Sites online today that are complete failures because they never realized how important it is to give their potential customers something valuable and something they could tell their friends and family about which ultimately sets off a chain reaction of word of mouth marketing that you didn’t have to lift a finger to accomplish.

This of course goes well beyond your Homepage. Your Sub pages and overall site functionality need this concept applied to them as well. Stay tuned for part 3 where I list some simple and easy steps you can take to go beyond your Homepage and make the second most important element of your site an effective and useful tool to get you results.