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What should I name my Wordpress homepage?
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I work almost exclusively in wordpress now. And I always hesitate when it comes to naming a site's homepage. I have to give it a name - right? I usually pick the business name or /home. And then that is identifies as the site's static homepage in the Wordpress settings and it works just fine.
But I've started to get warning that it is an issue because it creates redirects. For example, I just ran the Ryte service analysis on a website and it warned me about "Non-indexable pages with high relevance" and it's basically my homepage that has 29 incoming links that "passes all pagerank to https://ourdomain/home
But what am I supposed to call my homepage if not "Home"? It's not like the old days where anyone has to type it in. The root domain loads the homepage just as it should.
Can anybody advise me regarding best practices for what to name a Wordpress homepage for good SEO?
With thanks in advance for your help.
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"The primary domain will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do? "
I would call the homepage "Home" for the clients Because is ideal for breadcrumbs. In some situations especially e-commerce, it might be smart if it's a very well-known brand do use the well-known brand name as a homepage. For instance, switching "Home" with "Bestbuy"
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
See: https://yoast.com/breadcrumbs-seo/
the SERPS will show
"Home » SEO blog » WordPress » What are breadcrumbs? Why are they important for SEO?"
<title><strong>This is an example page title</strong> - <strong>Example.com</strong></title>
Yoast SEO offers an easy way to add breadcrumbs to your WordPress site via PHP. It will add everything necessary not just to add them to your site, but to get them ready for Google. Just add the following piece of code to your theme where you want them to appear:
`if ( function_exists('yoast_breadcrumb') ) { yoast_breadcrumb( ' ','` `' ); } ?>`
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If you have old you are I was like example.com/index.html or something like that. You can use this fantastic tool below the one labeled number two it is a miracle tool in my opinion for rewriting URLs U can write in anything in the custom URL and have it added to your htaccess file or nginx config file and you're up and running
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https://yoast.com/research/permalink-helper.php (love this tool)
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<label for="struct1">Default
?p=123
</label> -
<label for="struct2">Day and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct3">Month and Name
/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct4">Category - Name
/%category%/%postname%/
</label> -
<label for="struct5">Numeric
/archives/%post_id%
</label> -
custom you can use /%postname%/ or anything
<label for="struct1"></label><label for="struct2"></label><label for="struct3"></label><label for="struct4"></label><label for="struct6">Custom: or add what you want to change no matter what the URL</label>
RedirectMatch 301 ^//([^/]+)$ https://yoast.com/help/my-redirects-do-not-work//$1
Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccess
file:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([^/]+)/.html$ https://homepage.com/$1
Add the following redirect to the top of your
.htaccess
file:RedirectMatch 301 ^/([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(?!page/)(.+)$ https://homepage.com/$4
<form method="post">```
Even for NGINX> <form method="post"> > > Add the following redirect to the NGINX config file: > > ``` > rewrite "^/index.html" https://homepage.com/?p=$ permanent; > ```</form> If you’re moving your WordPress site to an entirely new domain, you’ll need to perform a domain redirect to avoid losing your content’s SEO. These instructions assume that you’ve backed up your site and[ moved it to its new domain](https://wordpress.org/support/article/moving-wordpress/). To perform this redirect, open up your _.htaccess_ file, and add this code to the top: `#Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newsite.COM/$1 [R=301,L]` Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. Use your new domain in place of _newsite.com_, and then save the file. You can also use any of the above-mentioned plugins to accomplish this task, as long as you activate it on your old site. * https://wordpress.org/support/article/creating-a-static-front-page/ * https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-a-custom-homepage-in-wordpress/ * **Big photos** * https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png * https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png * If you like APIs * https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/functionality/custom-front-page-templates/#is_front_page * https://wpengine.com/resources/wordpress-redirects/ Hope this helps & is not to overkill, Tom [IR8plPZ.png](https://i.imgur.com/IR8plPZ.png) [U3rPAox.png](https://i.imgur.com/U3rPAox.png) [GH6TeOJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/GH6TeOJ.png) [1ae8hu6.png](https://i.imgur.com/1ae8hu6.png)
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Thomas is making the right point that you do always want your domain to point to your homepage. How you "name" it depends on the platform you are using. Mine was a Wordpress question. But a traditional website used to call the homepage index.html and the browser or server knows to resolve to that for the homepage.
That's oversimplified, but the point is that it depends on the platform, but regardless of how you get there, you want your domain to go to your homepage.
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Tom,
I appreciate your reply and attempt to help. But I'm not sure you understand what I am asking. I understand the concept of the root domain and redirect, etc well.
The primary domain, will definitely resolve to the homepage. My question is fairly Wordpress specific. When you create a new page or post you give it a title. Calling it "home" makes it easy to find on the admin side in the list of pages.
Whatever page I set as the "homepage" in the Wordpress admin settings, then the domain will resolve to that page no matter what I call it. And no one has to add the title as part of the URL or anything after the / to get there.
I could leave off the title of the page completely. It's not ideal for when I hand it off to clients. (People like things to be clearly labeled what they are.) But is that what you are suggesting I always do?
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Is it advisable to make a different name for your homepage and still get it ranked on search Engine? I open a new blog so that is what I want to know.
Thank you.
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Name it https://ourdomain/
I would be extremely wary of creating a subfolder for the homepage. I would name the page home in the navigation name it whatever the site name is in the title tag.
To learn more about the title tag please read here https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
if you are thinking of re-creating your URL structure in the same manner in which you demonstrated that you strongly recommend against it.
people who understand how to navigate websites and there are very many of them will go back to the/ after .com or whatever your URL TLD is I would strongly recommend against using /home unless you are redirecting from your old site to your new site which then I would strongly recommend redirecting both .com/home & .com/ to the same homepage that is simply one "/" after the TLD or .com
I hope that helps,
Tom
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