Gone are the days of the homepage. True, every website has one, but the days when website owners expect their homepage to do all the heavy lifting are gone.
Thanks to the evolving science of search, the search engines have made our lives easier by providing the consumer with relevant search results for specific keyword queries. Visitors now stream directly into websites via side doors and back doors. They can magically teleport into a website without ever seeing the homepage; they are practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.
For a consumer looking for a specific product or service, this is fantastic, but for site owners and operators, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you would potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified considerably. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around. The same thought and energy you put into the homepage of the site to brand the product or company must be put into each page that you intend to be searchable for the consumers that you want to be on your site.
Like I said, gone are the days when a website’s homepage could be counted on to do the heavy lifting. Now, all search-findable pages must be counted upon to do the lifting all by themselves. This involves a lot of research, work, and someone that knows what they are doing.
It is for this reason that my heart sinks when a growing business or ministry with lots of potential tells us “thank you for the proposal, but my nephew said he is learning web design and he is going to do our website.” BIG mistake. BIIIIIIIIG mistake.
I’m glad that your nephew is learning web design, but VERY rarely, and I do mean VERY rarely will you find a single person that is good at designing the layout of a new site, building it from the ground up using the most current and fastest-loading code, optimizing the site based on actual keyword and phrase research, and launching a full-blown internet marketing campaign based on the most current and ever changing search engine algorithms. This process is not one person’s job: it takes a team of people to pull this off and to pull it off well.
If you are a business owner, a ministry leader, an entrepreneur, or someone that needs to be visible on the web, don’t go cheap. You get what you pay for! Five years ago it may have been okay to just have a website by someone that just figured out how to do it. Having a website is no longer the goal – the goal is USING the website to create leads and sales.
** This content was adapted from The Truth About Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb
The Internet has come a long way in the little over a decade it’s been part of daily life. Not only do some 25% of the world’s population now have ‘net access [Internet World Stats, June 2009], but it’s easier than ever for those users to contribute to the Web rather than just passively consuming its content.