Minimum # of words on a homepage?
-
When I design sites for clients I try to keep the homepage clean and simple. As a result, I usually end up with very little actual content.
For SEO purposes. What is the minimum # of words that I should have on any given homepage to avoid being penalized by Google?
Does it have to be at least 150 or something like that? Even though my internal pages have plenty?
thanks,
Martin
-
Hi Martin
There is no magic number although I have heard 100, 150, 300, 450 all given as the "best practice".
The minimum I would suggest would need to be an amount in which you could achieve mentioning the primary keyword naturally at least 2 or 3 times.
I tend to use the text on a home page as an introduction mentioning the company name, what it does and where. More details are then provided on an about us page. This approach usually means that keywords, phrases and brands are covered in this text.
There is obviously a balance to be achieved between providing not too much text for the user as we are told they don't read it but provide enough for the search engines to be happy.
-
For SEO purposes. What is the minimum # of words that I should have on any given homepage to avoid being penalized by Google?
Google does not penalize for a lack of content.... it is more the people involved in the website walking away from opportunity and therefore money. You penalize yourself on this.
Design is very important but in addition the website should accomplish the goals of the business. Those include: communicating a message, engaging the visitor and competing well in search. For most websites the homepage is the most powerful page and that makes it the one capable for competing for the most difficult (and often most profitable) keywords.
Take advantage of that power!
Great designers understand the goals of the business and understand SEO as well. They "get" these things perfectly. Then, they use their design skill to make a website that accomplilshes them first and at the same time is attractive. Sometimes trade-offs are made - but great designers can get all of the needed words on a page and still make it look fantastic.
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
-
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
Is my home page over optimized for this key word?
I've been working for a couple of months not to try and get my site optimized for the key word "kayak fishing". I haven't done any black hat linking or anything and my site had disappeared passed page 76 on Google United States... Did I over optimize things? I get an A for the onpage reports from SEOMOZ. site: www.yakangler.com Keyword: Kayak Fishing
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Is it better to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Is it better for SEO to delete web pages that I don't want anymore or should I 301 redirect all of the pages I delete to the homepage or another live page?
Technical SEO | | CustomOnlineMarketing0 -
SEO problem if homepage is 2 folders deep?
We are currently looking at a site for a client, where instead of featuring standard file structure, every folder is being buried two folders deep by the CMS. So the homepage is: www.domain.com.au/folder/folder And a subpage is: www.domain.com.au/folder/folder/subpage Is this necessarily and SEO problem? Will it be positive for rankings to pull out the two redundant folders? Any insights are appreciated! Cheers
Technical SEO | | MarketingResults0 -
I'm getting a Duplicate Content error in my Pro Dashboard for 2 versions of my Homepage. What is the best way to handle this issue?
Hi SEOMoz,I am trying to fix the final issues in my site crawl. One that confuses me is this canonical homepage URL fix. It says I have duplicate content on the following pages:http://www.accupos.com/http://www.accupos.com/index.phpWhat would be the best way to fix this problem? (...the first URL has a higher page authority by 10 points and 100+ more inbound links).Respectfully Yours,Derek M.
Technical SEO | | DerekM880 -
Homepage outranked by sub pages - reason for concern?
Hey All, trying to figure out how concerned I should be about this. So here is the scoop, would appreciate your thoughts. We have several eCommerce websites that have been affected by Panda, do to content from manufacturers and lack of original content. We have been working hard to write our own descriptions and are seeing an increase in traffic again. We have also been writing blogs since February and are getting a lot of visits to them. Here is the problem, our blog pages are now outranking our homepage when you type in site:domain-name Is this a problem? our home page does not show up until you are 3 pages in. However when you type in just our domain name in google as a search it does show up in position one with sitelinks under it. This is happening across both of our sites. Is this a cause for concern or just natural due to our blogs being more popular than our homepage. Thanks! Josh
Technical SEO | | prima-2535090 -
301 category page to Homepage to increase authority
Hello all, Hope everyone is well and are enjoying the summer. I am currently working with a site: www.corporatehealth.co.uk and have been trying to rank on the first page for the keyword occupational health. currently we are ranking on the second page: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=occupational+health&pws=0&gl=uk#q=occupational+health&hl=en&pws=0&gl=uk&prmd=ivnsb&ei=38dUTuHCDdGKhQetqZn5BQ&start=10&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=80a9548917d021a&biw=1920&bih=878 I understand I need to get more links pointing to the site and page itself. My idea was to do a 301 redirect from the occupational health page to the homepage and add occupational health content to the homepage as ultimately they are an occupational health service supplier. Was hoping to get anyones thoughts on the issue. Thanks in advance Shehzad
Technical SEO | | Gareth_Cartman0 -
Best practices for country homepage
Hi, What are the SEO best practices for redirecting to the correct language site based on geographic location? Right now, we're using a 302 redirect to point users to the right country landing page. User reaches site: domain.com > Server detects location > 302 redirect to domain.com/french We'd like to optimize the site for all languages, but which country gets the SEO rank for the domain.com? Thanks for your help! Roya
Technical SEO | | roya0