Least Text for Home Page
-
We are rebranding our web site and intend to create more visual pages with less text on the assumption that no one want to read anymore.
What is the least amount of text that we can include in a home page without damaging out ability to rank on Google? Google recently increased the permitted amount of text on description tags. Can we shift text to the description tax and place more on ALT tags that are not immediately visible to visitors.
Any thoughts, comments, advice??
I am adding image of the old home page and new home page (text to be written, 3 columns of dummy text) so the change in the amount of text is visible.
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Kingalan
I can understand you not wishing to fill your home page with spurious content but you need something to tell the user what the website is all about. It's OK adding a great title but that is only a maximum of 70 characters, depending on the width of the letters. So you really can't convey the full meaning of the page with so few words. (The user rarely sees the title anyway)
Similarly, the description only allows 315 characters but is not used as a ranking factor, so that is not considered as home page content. (And is rarely seen by the user)
The alt text on the images on the page will be read as part of the content so I would recommend one major feature image with a strong key phrase for the alt. (Wordpress calls this the 'focus keyword' but I would simply call it your 'primary keyword' or phrase). Other images can use semantically related keywords and phrases.
My advice is to write around 300+ words of contextually rich content designed to be read by the website visitor whether you believe it will be read or not. This is headed by an H1 which echoes the title using semantically connected keywords. I'd consider this to be the minimum to convey the meaning of the page and be able to use keyword rich content to rank it for the satisfaction of user intent.
If you need more than 300 words then separate into blocks with H2 headers.
The important thing to remember is to make the writing compelling and relevant - people do read homepage content, so rather than thinking how few words you can write, think about 'what can I write that is great for the user and shows Google the theme of the page'
I hope that helps,
Regards
Nigel
-
Hi Kingalan1.
I'm going to copy and paste this text from John Müller, Webmaster Trend- Analyst, Google Schweiz:
"There is no minimum extension and there is not a minimum number of articles per day that you have to publish, not even a minimum number of pages on a website. In most cases, quality is better than quantity. Our algorithms explicitly try to find a recommended website that offers content that is high quality, unique and attractive to users. Do not fill your page with low quality content, instead it works to make sure that your website is absolutely the best of its kind."
So, I use this tips:
1. Good keywords analysis
2. Good URL with keywords
3. Good Title (keep in mind the H1, H2.. tags)
4. Good Description
In conclusion, be the best. If after analyzing the competition you think there is room to improve the present, do it. A simple way is to use the skyscrapper technique . It basically consists in detecting what is working for the competition and multiplying it by a thousand .
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
-
Put a 301 from /main to home page, now I'm panicking
Hi, Our website is 10 years old, but I only noticed last night we had a https://curveball-media.co.uk/main page which has some badly formatted copy on. I redirected (301) to the home page https://curveball-media.co.uk/ Then I had a slight panic that maybe this was the wrong thing to do and it should be like it was with the home page and the /main page. Should I have left it or did I do the right thing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Best way to link to 1000 city landing pages from index page in a way that google follows/crawls these links (without building country pages)?
Currently we have direct links to the top 100 country and city landing pages on our index page of the root domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
I would like to add in the index page for each country a link "more cities" which then loads dynamically (without reloading the page and without redirecting to another page) a list with links to all cities in this country.
I do not want to dillute "link juice" to my top 100 country and city landing pages on the index page.
I would still like google to be able to crawl and follow these links to cities that I load dynamically later. In this particular case typical site hiearchy of country pages with links to all cities is not an option. Any recommendations on how best to implement?0 -
SEO impact of mouse over text on product page
Hi, we recently improved our product page to show more color options, like this http://www.prams.net/knorr-baby-voletto-sport-pram-stroller-reversible-seat-green-a?inref=home-left In order to improve the seo, we expanded our rich snippets the following way we added all color options, skus and prices as "items offered" we are showing the highest and lowest price range and eliminated the base price https://developers.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/ Google now shows the price range in the rich snippet. The questions is: as the user see the original color, the price and the sku only when mousing over the small images. We are worried that this could be treated a "hidden text". Does anybody have experience in this matter or a way a to solve it better? Thanks in advance Dieter 8WthtQY
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Storesco0 -
Suspected hacking - Google has detected that some of your pages may contain hidden text or cloaking
I got below message from google, But I did not see any hidden text, Please check it. http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/: Suspected hacking Google has detected that some of your pages may contain hidden text or cloaking, techniques that are outside our Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, we detected that your site may have been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index. Sample URLs: http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/ http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/about-us/ http://www.astrologerravisharma.com/achievements/ Recommended action Clean up the hacked content so that your site meets Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bondhoward0 -
Parent pages
Hi guys, A website has many venue pages, for example: www.example.com/venue/paris For some reason the parent www.example.com/venue/ is 301 redirecting to a minor page elsewhere on the website. Should I remove the 301 redirect and then create www.example.com/venue/ page that then links to all the venues? My thinking is: Google will expect there to be a /venue/ 'parent' page So if the parent page is redirecting to a minor page elsewhere within the website its telling Google all the venues like paris must be even less important. Should I do it? Any suggestions from fellow SEOMoz's would be appreciated! All the best Richard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Richard5550 -
Changing keyword target on home page? Will it work?
I have a site that is in the financial services niche and has around 20 pages talking about different services. I want to change the goal of the site and now just target Insurance. The current home page is a simple introduction to the website, I was going to change this to target the insurance keyword and put around 500 words content on the front page. I was also going to change the Page Title, Description and H1 tags too. My question is will the front page then rank for that keyword once google recrawls the site? Could I damage the PR of the site or any other factors from changing the front page. Here are some stats about the site 11 years old PR 3 Page Mozrank 5.58 Page Moztrust 5.61 Domain Mozrank 2.29 Domain Moztrust 3.17 Thanks for your help guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
Does a page on a site with high domain authority build page authority easier? i.e. less inbound links?
Is this also why people build backlinks to their BBB profiles, Yellowpages Profiles, etc. i.e. why do people build backlinks to other pages that link to them? Wouldn't it be more beneficial to just build that backlink directly to your target?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | adriandg0 -
Category pages in forums
I would like to hear feedback on the best SEO practice for forum category pages. An example would be a forum about cars. You can have a Chervorlet category which contains forums for every chevy model. Often this category page is simply a list of all the forums. If I noindex, follow the page then am I missing an opportunity? I am thinking of Google sitemaps for example where this page can be used for a category link. If I noindex the page, there probably isn't another great place for a sitemap to link to. I could fill out the page with wiki-like generic chevy information. Please share any thoughts or best practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0