When people are designing their websites, the one page that almost all everyone spends the most time and concern over is the homepage. As someone who designs websites, I can definitely tell you that the lion’s share of the design time spent with a client is about the homepage while the secondary pages are often just an afterthought. But is all that time spent designing and redesigning that homepage justified? Perhaps it was back in the late 90′s and early 2000′s, but it isn’t so much anymore.
Why? One reason is that search engines has gotten so much smarter and effective than they were back then. Instead of search engines being just a list or a directory of websites, they’re able to dig deep into websites and find the content that people are actually looking for. And in most cases, that content is often not on the homepage…it’s usually deep within the secondary pages of a website.
Another reason is that these days people are sharing links to web pages instead of websites . So instead of just providing a link to a website like http://www.craftedweb.com, they’re sharing links to specific pages within a website like http://www.craftedweb.com/miscellaneous/blogging-what-to-do-with-your-old-blog-posts/ In fact, a good portion of your website visitors will probably never see your homepage.
So what does this mean for your website? Basically this means that you need to pay more attention to the secondary pages of your website, especially those pages that contain a lot of content or those pages that are part of buying process or list building process. You need to pay as much attention to those pages as you do for your homepage. Some of those pages may include:
- Product pages
- Product category pages
- Shopping cart page
- Mailing list signup page
- About pages
You may also want to check your website statistics to see which pages get the most traffic. Don’t be too surprised if your homepage isn’t at the top of your list.
This also means that you can’t get away with just providing things like your contact information and a sign up form for your mailing list on just one page of your website or only on the homepage. Because chances are that your visitors won’t see it if they enter your website on pages other than your website. If it’s important, it should appear somewhere on every page of your website.
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Ah, cutting edge information. Does this mean we need to customize our permalinks in the blogs. Also, I like your updated info on how the search engines are thinking these days. Thanks so much for sharing your expertise.