Your Other Homepage

Technically when we say homepage, we actually mean the first page you see on your website. When we say your landing page, it’s actually refering to your other main pages or the top page of every sub-category/level.

For instance, if I had a button called Categories and when you click on it or place your mouse cursor over it, it drops down several other options. The Categories link when clicked on brings you to your landing page for that parent link.

Some people don’t have a landing page for their parent link because it doesn’t benefit their website. However, when some people do use their landing pages, some don’t use it beneficially.

I’m going to try and address something that I feel is a good topic to discuss on after reading the Forrester Research newsletter.

Users who begin site visits on lower-level pages — like landing pages — need to know that they’ve arrived in the right place and to see evidence that they can complete their goals. To support these users, site managers should consistently apply design principles that orient users and help them quickly identify the best path to their goals.

So we need to apply some simple design principles to our landing pages. It doesn’t mean you need to differentiate the landing pages using different colors. Few of the simpler methods to solve this:

  • Maintain the logo position OR
  • Make sure the title of the company and the page is present OR
  • Content needs to be explanatory by the first paragraph OR
  • Content needs to stand out though not as much as the logo.
  • And etc..

You don’t need to use such drastic measures to make sure visitors know that is your website. Don’t need to have a huge mascot right beside your content chanting your name. All you need is to follow the simple principles that sometimes doesn’t even require an extra design.

Looking at human behaviour regarding this issue. Let’s use someone searching for simple steps to make their website better. He or she types in their query into Google and so happen to finds either my weblog or another website. They click on the link from Google that leads them here and later they’ll quickly scan through the content.

Once they’re done, whether or not it fulfilled their goal, you have only 60 seconds of their attention to communicate who you are and what your company might be doing.

So if you’re running a large website, e-commerce shop or any website, have your landing pages been effective enough lately?

3 thoughts on “Your Other Homepage”

  1. If you’ve got time. My web site is only 3 months old. My first attempt was a feeble effort using site builder (Yahoo is my web host) Just recently in the past week I’ve revised it (6 pages now, 5 before) My ranking was pretty good with the old version. Terrible now with the revised version. I know they will be crawling again soon. But in the Yahoo results, clicking on “cashed” it says it took a picture when it crawled of very poor page. (the home page which at the time was terrible)results for “dog ear medicine” in Yahoo is the 13th page. In google (8th page) clicking “cached” takes me to testimonials (old version) page, not the home page. I dont have good key words, etc. on this page. Why does google go to this page and Yahoo goes to the home page? Maybe if I’m patient and wait till they reindex (who knows when) my problems will disapear. Thanks in advance. I’m very new at this as you can tell.
    Regards Alfred McNicoll

  2. Thanks for swinging by, Alfred. The fundamentals of search engine optimization are:
    1. Title tags
    2. META tags
    3. Keywords/Phrases
    4. Heading tags
    5. Realistic expectations of results

    You may have the upper hand in Yahoo due to the META tags. But Google isn’t fooled so much by them and analyzes more of your written content. From what I have read on your website, the content wasn’t optimized to target ‘dog ear medicine’. However, if you searched ‘dog inner ear yeast infection’ yours is #1 on Google.

    Even when I searched ‘dog ear yeast infection’, your website wasn’t on page #1 of Google. I found this due to the arrangement of the words in your Title tag. Currently, you have placed ‘antibiotic steroid medicine’ as the first part and the ‘ear infection’ behind. As you can see, this affects your search engine results.

    Therefore, I would advice rethinking the phrases you want to target and optimizing your website again. :)

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