Home page mostly graphic image
-
I have a new customer that is redesigning her website. The graphic designer has designed a lovely homepage that is mostly an image with some navigation and footer area for text information.
My concern is that there isn't any real call to action or anything on the homepage design other than an interesting and fun graphic. It seems like years ago this was a common practice and then later it was looked down on as not good for the user experience or SEO.
What is the latest thinking on this type of design? Should the homepage (www.mysite.com) be allowed to be mostly images? Or should we focus on the optimizing the internal pages and let the homepage be more creative?
-
New site plus no content equals no ranking. You will need a lot of anchor text to help rank the site.
Read chapter 4
-
Thanks for the response, Francisco. The homepage wouldn't be Flash, just an image a short menu for navigation and then some footer info. The new design isn't live yet. It's just a concept. I wanted to run the idea by the experts before I let her know what was best.
My hunch is that it's not a great idea but thought there might be ways to deal with it and not take a big hit.
She'll be changing her domain name at the same time as she's changing her design, too. So, it's all up in the air at the moment and I want to give her the best advice I can before she heads in a direction she'll regret later.
I've included a mockup of the homepage in this reply. The graphic would change since this one is just a concept/placeholder graphic but the concept is of a neighborhood with streets and paths all around.
-
If the owner will not allow the home page to be optimized, then make your internal pages optimized. Also, unless you are Lexus or a company with a lot of branding, trying to get a flash site to rank will be difficult because there is no text.
I personally would put content on there. Do not be afraid to share the domain here to give better feedback.
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
-
Home page cannibal
I was wondering if others had the same problem I have. It appears Google loves that home page too much and I'm having a difficult time getting it to rank the page I really want. And that happens if a keyword I want to rank for only appears on the home page one time with a keyword density of .1%. Take vanillaqueen.com for example. The home page ranks on the first page for "bulk vanilla beans" and not http://vanillaqueen.com/shop/category/vanilla-beans/ or http://vanillaqueen.com/five-reasons-why-buying-bulk-vanilla-makes-good-sense/ And I'll add another one that I recently took on. This is a personal injury attorney in a large city so there is a ton of competition who have been doing SEO for a very long time. (Fortunately he also does business and civil litigation law to keep the business going). Last month, according to webmaster tools, he got a couple of clicks (hey, it's something!) on "personal injury attorney [his city]" on page 2 in the SERPS, but it was his home page. http://bit.ly/1Gvumlm **In this case I don't mind people landing on the home page, but does the fact that another page that is much better optimized for those keywords indicate a penalty on that page? And is his rank lower because the better page is not ranking and Google has to find the next best thing in the home page? ** Has anyone else experienced that and what have you done to get Google to not go home? P.S. The law site is a huge challenge because of the competition. Any help you pros out there can offer to get this underdog out of hiding will be much appreciated. We're starting a smart, strategic content marketing plan now that I'm very excited about.
On-Page Optimization | | katandmouse1 -
On Brand Queries Google does not shows my home page first instead of it shows internal pages.
Also on my brand query it doesn't shows sitelinks. What may be the reason?
On-Page Optimization | | vivekrathore0 -
Replacing text with images
Hello, My client is a "cheap calls" site which is offering calls to around 300 countries in the world. The pages for each country are almost the same, as they are mostly terms and conditions of making a call and explanation of the process how to do it. The copy is quite long (more than 850 words) and the country name is repeated about 26 times in the text. The country name and the phone number is the main difference between the pages, which makes them almost the same. I have recommended to add testimonials to each country and towns within the country, but I am afraid it will not dilute the similarity between the pages enough for Google to stop seeing them as duplicated. Also the client do not exactly rush to publish the testimonials for every country. The rankings are not too bad and all seems fine, but in the long term I know we need to do something. I am not sure if the client would agree to shorten up the copy, as they believe in old style seo with keyword stuffing and bolded keywords but I would like to overcome that problem with exchanging the most of the copy with an image. I would write a new copy for each page making it unique (around 2-3 paragraphs) and the rest would be an image stating exactly the same thing as the copy now to provide the same amount of info to the user. Theoretically it should help to resolve this problem, but would like to check if anyone has done something like that and if it worked/may work. Are they any other implications?
On-Page Optimization | | ThinkingJuice0 -
Advanced tags in images
Is it true that one can improve image seo by adding metadata to the details (right click image and choose details), like tags and comments. I never heard of doing this before. It seems like grasping at straws.
On-Page Optimization | | Webzenz0 -
What if Paginated Pages all have PageRank?
Paginated Pages, page 2,3,4 etc.... they aren't supposed to have a PageRank, right? If they are only linked to from themselves, only the original page, Page 1, is supposed to be showing PageRank? I'm trying to double check that I am handling this right. I'm not using canonical, or noindex or any of that... just using rel next and prev, which I thought would be fine. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | MadeLoud0 -
View all Page for Product Overview Pages
Hi everybody! We have an ecommerce site with product overview pages, where sometimes there are hundreds of products listed. Usually, we just display 30 and have a button where users can click to see 30 more - or all products listed at once. This is the overview page (as indexed in google): http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html
On-Page Optimization | | zeepartner
And this is the view-all page: http://www.geschenkidee.ch/aussergewoehnliches.html#all What should I do here? The product overview page will hardly generate more traffic by listing all products (because the overview page will rank for generic keywords, while the product keyword searches will be referred to the specific product pages themselves). I was originally thinking of using rel=canonical pointing to the view-all page. But this would just lead to longer load time. Should we just leave those overview pages or is there a best practice for how to deal with such pages? Thanks for your thoughts on this!0 -
Too Many on page links
What is everyone's opinion on this? < 100 at all times? 100 -200 Okay? 200-300+ A little much?
On-Page Optimization | | MirandaP0 -
Page without content
Hey Everyone, I've started an SEO On Page analysis for a web site and I've found a lot of duplicate content and useless pages. What do I have to do? Delete this useless page, redirect or do canonical tag? If I have to delete what is the best way to do? Should I use GWT to delete? or just delete from the server? This URL for example: http://www.sexshopone.com.br/?1.2.44.0,0,1,13,0,0,aneis-evolved-boss-cock's.html [admin note: NSFW page} There is no content and it is duplicate in reference of this: http://www.sexshopone.com.br/?1.2.44.0,0,1,12,0,0,aneis-evolved-boss-cock's.html [admin note: NSFW page} and the correct page of the product is: http://www.sexshopone.com.br/?1.2.44.0,423,anel-peniano-evolved-boss-cock's-pleasure-rings-collar-white-reutilizavel-e-a-prova-d'agua-colecao-evolved.html [admin note: NSFW page} What is happening is that we have 8.000 pages like this. Useless and without any content. How do I proceed? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | luf07090