Index Page Content
-
Mozers,
I am of the believe and as a person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in.
I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results.
We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development.
Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two.
I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue
So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice.
1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page
2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process.
As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult
Cheers
John
-
Hi John,
No it's very far from a text spinner it's a fantastic way to get fresh relevant content onto the site and know that the words will relate to each other and work with new Google's algorithm as well.
I'm glad I could be of help. Good luck with your site and I'm certain it will be great.
all the best,
Tom
-
Thanks a million Thomas ...
Your advice is very much appreciated ...
I had never came across Scribe, at first I thought it was another text spinner .... but watching their video, it seems a lot more ...
Cheers again
John
-
Hi John,
in my opinion you will be all right if you follow the correct steps. Definitely use rich snippets
https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/
they can say a lot without showing up on your page showing up.
Another tool I would highly suggest if you want to make your words as relevant as possible is
it is able to be used with Microsoft Word and via the browser alone so you do not have to be a WordPress user to take advantage of it.
If you give it a good enough description along with a high-quality site map and don't forget to name your internal links with keywords as you really don't have much to play with you have to use what you got.
If I can be of more help please let me know. I think if the website is good enough you will rank very well. I have seen flash websites for good companies rank very high and that is we know has nothing behind it in terms of what the Google bot read.
sincerely,
Thomas
-
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for the reply
Yes, I mean Front Page when I refer to index page (should I take my web designer old school web designer hat off :D) .... We had suggested using text as opposed to his logo, but the font is an issue (always something) ,so unfortunately we are left with using an image.
We will optimize meta tags correctly ,as with the two alt tags we will have, we purposely decided not to use JS for the resizing of the front image full page and will target each monitor size with a different image through CSS ,thus allowing us a second alt tag along with the one for the logo.
But here also lies the problem, its essentially an e-commerce website, we have built it the website and incorporated Foxy Cart (shameless plug for amazing software for any developers out there), allowing us to dictate all URL naming extensions and so on
But content internally is not great either, but that's something we know we need to address. We will include a structured blog style section within thew website, which we are sure will give us a lot more scope in relation to targeting phrases. Its the only road we can go down in realtion to getting content within the website
But refreshingly, you give me hope if you say that it wont be detrimental to the project that lack of front page content
Regards
John
-
when you say their index page. Are you referring to their homepage?
If it is only one page you may not have an issue. However, I would use my alt text wisely. In addition, I would make any words that are written at all real words. Not a photograph just place the type on top of the photo if you can.
Look up some of the ways people have ranked flash pages I know it has been done successfully I don't know how successfully but I know it has been done
I would hope the rest of the website has some content? if not I would imagine you would have a hard time ranking in Google.
view-source:http://www.vogue.com/
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
-
Does a JS script who scroll automaticaly into pages could make some content "hidden" ?
Hello everybody, Sorry for my english (I'm French), I will try to do my best... We've got an e-commerce website : kumulusvape.fr
On-Page Optimization | | KumulusVape
On each categories, to improve our conversion rate, we put a javascript to automaticaly scroll into the page to the product list. You can see an example here : http://www.kumulusvape.fr/44-e-liquide-savourea-smookies This script scroll and make some content "hidden".
It's not really a scroll, just changing page position. Do you think that our h1 and our category content could be consider "hidden" by Google ? Thank you very much for your help0 -
Impact of number of outgoing links on Page Rank of an optimized page?
What is the current best practice on preferred number of outbound links on a page you are trying to rank with: According to online resources form a pure page rank perspective a high number of outbound follow links can have a negative impact not only on child pages but also the page itself
On-Page Optimization | | thomaspro
http://pr.efactory.de/e-outbound-links.shtml Other resources suggest that particularly placing high quality outbound links on a page (nofollow) increases the trust and authority of a page Are there any other elements to keep in mind? Is the best practice to avoid any follow links on a page you want to rank well in Google for? Thanks /T0 -
Will Google re-index the page if content is changed/improved?
Hello,
On-Page Optimization | | wickedsunny1
i have a little question, it seems most of my posts which are 3 years old or even more, all have almost same type of 2-3 lines of text at post starting and then images roundups etc.
which recently stopped getting any traffic from google. Probably becuase of lack in text etc.
So if i now edit those old pages, will they be reindexed in google with this new content/data?
thanks in advance.
cheers0 -
Should I worry about duplicate titles on pages where there is paginated content?
LivingThere.com is a real estate search site and many of our content pages are "search result" - ish in that a page often provides all the listings that are available and this may go on for multiple pages. For example, this is a primary page about a building: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange Because of the number of listings, the listings paginate to a second page: http://livingthere.com/building/31308-Cocoa-Exchange?MListings_page=2 Both pages have the same Page Title. Is this a concern? If so is there a "best practice" for giving paginated content different titles? Thanks! Nate
On-Page Optimization | | nate1230 -
I have one page on my site... but still get duplicate name and content errors.
i have only the index.html page. my domain has a permanent 301 to the root. why am i getting duplicate problems? i only have one page the index .html???
On-Page Optimization | | one4u2see0 -
Why Does SEOMOZ Crawl show that i have 5,769 pages with Duplicate Content
Hello... I'm trying to do some analysis on my site (http://goo.gl/JgK1e) and SEOMOZ Crawl Diagnostics is telling me that I have 5,769 pages with duplicate content. Can someone, anyone, please help me understand: how does SEOMOZ determine if i have duplicate content Is it correct ? Are there really that many pages of duplicate content How do i fix this, if true <---- ** Most important ** Thanks in advance for any help!!
On-Page Optimization | | Prime850 -
3 keywords optomize for home page. Should I create page with thoses keywords or leave it like this?
My online store home page, Furnace Filters Canada has 3 keywords with good ranking in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters canada'' rank #1 position in google.ca keywords: ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter'' are on 5 or 6th position of page 1 in google.ca Those keywords are bringing most of the traffic to our site. To achieve this ranking, I had to use the On-Page Keyword Optimization, tool from seoMoz Questions: It is possible for me to create a page with the URL: https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filters or https://www.furnacefilterscanada.com/Furnace-Filter Can this improve my ranking with keywords like, ''furnace filters'' and ''furnace filter''? Is this a waist of time? If I decide to create a new page for optimization with, do I have to create one for singular and another one for plural? Creating a new page also mean removing, '' Furnace Filter'' in the home page title, until the new pages are index, I'm afraid to loss that 5th position in Google. Should I leave the home page title like it is now, '' Furnace Filter - Furnace Filters Canada - Online Shopping Store NOTE: we only do business in Canada, that is why Google.ca is more important to us Thank you, Jean Nichols
On-Page Optimization | | BigBlaze2050 -
Does Frequency of content updates affect likelyhood outbound links will be indexed?
I have several pages on our website with low pr, that also themselves link to lots and lots of pages that are service/product specific. Since there are so many outbound links, I know that the small amount of PR will be spread thin as it is. My question is, if I were to supply fresh content to the top level pages, and change it often, would that influence whether or not google indexes the underlying pages? Also if I supply fresh content to the underlying pages, once google crawls them, would that guarantee that google considers them 'important' enough to be indexed" I guess my real question is, can freshness of content and frequency of update convince google that the underlying pages are 'worthy of being indexed', and can producing fresh content on those pages 'keep google's interest', so to speak, despite having little if any pagerank.
On-Page Optimization | | ilyaelbert0