Home page what should it say

Cultivate a reputation for expertise and trustworthiness in a specific area. Provide information about who publishes your site, provides the content, and its goals. If you have a shopping or other financial transaction website, make sure you have clear and satisfying customer service information to help users resolve issues. If you have a news sites, provide clear information about who is responsible for the content.

Using appropriate technologies is also important. If a shopping checkout page doesn't have a secure connection, users cannot trust the site. Expertise and authoritativeness of a site increases its quality. Be sure that content on your site is created or edited by people with expertise in the topic. For example, providing expert or experienced sources can help users understand articles' expertise.

Representing well-established consensus in pages on scientific topics is a good practice if such consensus exists. Make sure content is factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.

So, for example, if you describe your page as a recipe, provide a complete recipe that is easy to follow, rather than just a set of ingredients or a basic description of the dish. We expect advertisements to be visible. However, don't let the advertisements distract users or prevent them from consuming the site content.

For example, advertisements, supplement contents, or interstitial pages pages displayed before or after the content you are expecting that make it difficult to use the website. Learn more about this topic. Link text is the visible text inside a link. This text tells users and Google something about the page you're linking to. Links on your page may be internal—pointing to other pages on your site—or external—leading to content on other sites.

In either of these cases, the better your anchor text is, the easier it is for users to navigate and for Google to understand what the page you're linking to is about. With appropriate anchor text, users and search engines can easily understand what the linked pages contain. Make it easy for users to distinguish between regular text and the anchor text of your links. Your content becomes less useful if users miss the links or accidentally click them.

You may usually think about linking in terms of pointing to outside websites, but paying more attention to the anchor text used for internal links can help users and Google navigate your site better.

You can confer some of your site's reputation to another site when your site links to it. Sometimes users can take advantage of this by adding links to their own site in your comment sections or message boards.

Or sometimes you might mention a site in a negative way and don't want to confer any of your reputation upon it. For example, imagine that you're writing a blog post on the topic of comment spamming and you want to call out a site that recently comment spammed your blog. You want to warn others of the site, so you include the link to it in your content; however, you certainly don't want to give the site some of your reputation from your link. This would be a good time to use nofollow. Another example when the nofollow attribute can come handy are widget links.

If you are using a third party's widget to enrich the experience of your site and engage users, check if it contains any links that you did not intend to place on your site along with the widget. Some widgets may add links to your site which are not your editorial choice and contain anchor text that you as a website owner may not control.

If removing such unwanted links from the widget is not possible, you can always disable them with nofollow. If you create a widget for functionality or content that you provide, make sure to include the nofollow on links in the default code snippet. You can find more details about robots meta tags in our documentation. To tell Google not to follow or pass your page's reputation to the pages linked, set the value of the rel attribute of a link to nofollow or ugc.

When would this be useful? If your site has a blog with public commenting turned on, links within those comments could pass your reputation to pages that you may not be comfortable vouching for. Blog comment areas on pages are highly susceptible to comment spam. Nofollowing these user-added links ensures that you're not giving your page's hard-earned reputation to a spammy site. Many blogging software packages automatically nofollow user comments, but those that don't can most likely be manually edited to do this.

This advice also goes for other areas of your site that may involve user-generated content, such as guest books, forums, shout-boards, referrer listings, etc. If you're willing to vouch for links added by third parties for example, if a commenter is trusted on your site , then there's no need to use nofollow on links; however, linking to sites that Google considers spammy can affect the reputation of your own site.

Semantic HTML markup helps crawlers find and process images. Provide a descriptive filename and alt attribute description for images. The alt attribute allows you to specify alternative text for the image if it cannot be displayed for some reason. Why use this attribute? If a user is viewing your site using assistive technologies, such as a screen reader, the contents of the alt attribute provide information about the picture.

Another reason is that if you're using an image as a link, the alt text for that image will be treated similarly to the anchor text of a text link. However, we don't recommend using too many images for links in your site's navigation when text links could serve the same purpose. Lastly, optimizing your image filenames and alt text makes it easier for image search projects like Google Images to better understand your images. Like many of the other parts of the page targeted for optimization, filenames and alt text are best when they're short, but descriptive.

If you do decide to use an image as a link, filling out its alt text helps Google understand more about the page you're linking to. Imagine that you're writing anchor text for a text link. An Image sitemap can provide Googlebot with more information about the images found on your site. This increases the likelihood that your images can be found in Google Images results. The structure of this file is similar to the XML sitemap file for your web pages.

It's also a good idea to have the extension of your filename match with the file type. The world is mobile today. Most people are searching on Google using a mobile device. The desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device. As a result, having a mobile ready site is critical to your online presence. In fact, starting in late , Google has begun experiments to primarily use the mobile version of a site's content for ranking, parsing structured data, and generating snippets.

There are multiple ways of making your website mobile ready and Google supports different implementation methods :. After you have created a mobile-ready site, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check if pages on your site meet the criteria for being labeled mobile-friendly on Google Search result pages. You can also check out the Search Console Mobile Usability report to fix mobile usability issues affecting your site.

If your site serves lots of static content like blog posts or product landing pages across multiple pages, consider implementing it using AMP Accelerated Mobile Pages. It's a special flavor of HTML that ensures your site stays fast and user friendly, and can be further accelerated by various platforms, including Google Search.

Regardless of which configuration you choose to set up your mobile site, take note of these key points:. While most of the links to your site will be added gradually, as people discover your content through search or other ways and link to it, Google understands that you'd like to let others know about the hard work you've put into your content.

Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject. As with most points covered in this document, taking these recommendations to an extreme could actually harm the reputation of your site.

A blog post on your own site letting your visitor base know that you added something new is a great way to get the word out about new content or services. Other website owners who follow your site or RSS feed could pick the story up as well. Putting effort into the offline promotion of your company or site can also be rewarding. For example, if you have a business site, make sure its URL is listed on your business cards, letterhead, posters, etc.

You could also send out recurring newsletters to clients through the mail letting them know about new content on the company's website.

If you run a local business, adding its information to Google My Business will help you reach customers on Google Maps and Google Search. Sites built around user interaction and sharing have made it easier to match interested groups of people up with relevant content. Chances are, there are a number of sites that cover topic areas similar to yours. Opening up communication with these sites is usually beneficial. Hot topics in your niche or community could spark additional ideas for content or building a good community resource.

Major search engines, including Google, provide tools for website owners to analyze their performance in their search engine. For Google, that tool is Search Console. Search Console provides two important categories of information: Can Google find my content?

How am I performing in Google Search results? Using Search Console won't help your site get preferential treatment; however, it can help you identify issues that, if addressed, can help your site perform better in search results. Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools also offers tools for website owners. If you've improved the crawling and indexing of your site using Google Search Console or other services, you're probably curious about the traffic coming to your site.

Web analytics programs like Google Analytics are a valuable source of insight for this. You can use these to:. For advanced users, the information an analytics package provides, combined with data from your server log files, can provide even more comprehensive information about how visitors are interacting with your documents such as additional keywords that searchers might use to find your site.

You can find information about updates to Google Search, new Search Console features, and much more. Google Search Central Help Forum Post questions about your site's issues and find tips to create high quality sites from the product forum for website owners.

There are many experienced contributors in the forum, including Product Experts and occasionally Googlers. Google Search Central Twitter Follow us for news and resources to help you make a great site. Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Documentation Not much time? Beginner SEO Get started.

Establish your business details with Google. Advanced SEO Get started. Documentation updates. Go to Search Console. Getting started Are you on Google? If your site isn't in Google Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our crawlers miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons: The site isn't well connected from other sites on the web You've just launched a new site and Google hasn't had time to crawl it yet The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to crawl its content effectively Google received an error when trying to crawl your site Your policy blocks Google from crawling the site How do I get my site on Google?

Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself about your website when you get started. Is my website showing up on Google? Do I serve high-quality content to users? Is my local business showing up on Google? Is my content fast and easy to access on all devices? Is my website secure? Help Google find your content The first step to getting your site on Google is to be sure that Google can find it.

Tell Google which pages you don't want crawled For non-sensitive information, block unwanted crawling by using robots.

Avoid: Letting your internal search result pages be crawled by Google. Users dislike clicking a search engine result only to land on another search result page on your site. Allowing URLs created as a result of proxy services to be crawled. For sensitive information, use more secure methods A robots.

Help Google and users understand your content Let Google see your page the same way a user does When Googlebot crawls a page, it should see the page the same way an average user does. We also offer daily baseball news and events. Accurately describe the page's content Choose title text that reads naturally and effectively communicates the topic of the page's content. Using default or vague text like "Untitled" or "New Page 1".

Use the meta description tag A page's meta description tag gives Google and other search engines a summary of what the page is about. What are the merits of meta description tags?

Accurately summarize the page content Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your meta description tag as a snippet in a search result. Avoid: Writing a meta description tag that has no relation to the content on the page. Using generic descriptions like "This is a web page" or "Page about baseball cards".

Filling the description with only keywords. Copying and pasting the entire content of the document into the meta description tag.

Use unique descriptions for each page Having a different meta description tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain for example, searches using the site: operator.

Avoid: Using a single meta description tag across all of your site's pages or a large group of pages. For simple one-page websites this question is not actual: indeed, they represent only a home page which satisfies one or multiple functions and there is no other place where the traffic could be directed from the outer sources.

The same happens if the website is not complex, home is not overloaded with diverse links and navigation elements, so conversion can be reached right from it while other pages play secondary roles. In this case directing all the traffic to the most informative part of the site, which also enables a user to accomplish necessary action and get what they need, is a good idea.

However, for complex websites and platforms, especially if they satisfy multiple needs of broad target audience, this approach can be the step killing profitability and reducing conversion rates. The user can get scared, distracted or even annoyed with the amount of information they have to get through to find what they need, especially if focused on a particular narrow goal.

Landing page is focused on one item, to make it quickly found and reduce delays when target user seeks for specific operations, services or items. This is the issue of especially high importance in the case of e-commerce websites when unwise design solutions bring to poor user experience and financial losses.

The third set of tips is concentrated on the page looks. No doubt, the recommendations are applicable for any kind of webpage, still, on home page, they tend to be more influential. Color is power which can either strengthen or ruin other design decisions. Choosing the color palette, remember that colors influence user perception. Studying color psychology is helpful to make choices that transfer the right message.

Attention to traditional color theory will help to find the color combinations that will look elegant and harmonic. One more popular issue is the choice between light or dark background : the solution is mostly based on the type of content website presents. Text-based websites usually use light and airy interfaces while visual-based ones can apply dark background to make the images look deeper and more stylish.

Being full of data, home pages usually include the variety of icons and illustrations. Choosing them, always test their recognizability and check if they build right associations. If there is the risk of double meaning or culture differences of targetaudience, supporting the icons or illustrations with a short copy might be helpful.

Choice of fonts and their combination determine not only style but also readability of the home page. Even more, fonts, as well as colors, are also powerful in forming the mood of the page, from entertaining to business-like.

So take your time to test various combinations and find the one which corresponds to the nature of the website as well as other design elements. Most users are visually driven and perceive messages given in images faster than words. That is why applying custom theme illustrations, high-quality photos or hero banners is a profitable step for a home page.

The image of that kind will work as a quick hook catching users attention and transferring the necessary idea. However, overloading home page with images will make none of them effective. Another way to support interesting experience on home page is applying videos and animations. On the one hand, motion breathes life into the page, makes it more dynamic and lively, always draws attention. On the other hand, it can increase loading time.

Moreover, too much animation annoys users. So, motion should be added in unobtrusive way and thoroughly check in terms of its effect on page functionality. For the home page filled with various data, too long time of loading means losing the part of target audience. So, check the speed, optimize the images, make sure video and animation loads up correctly. Obviously, not all the list of mentioned tips is actual for every single project: approaches can differ as well as audience and goals of the created websites.

Yet, it may become a helpful checklist for web designers striving for home page usability. Best Practices for Website Header Design. Home Sweet Home. Strategies of Home Page Design.

Color Matters. These figures are increasing year over year, causing websites that are not responsive to lose progressively large portions of their audience. Ask any company if they would like to more than double their website traffic. It logically follows that with the projected increase in overall mobile share of internet traffic that this number will go up as well.

In fact many retailers are already known for their great mobile shopping experience and others are making significant improvements to theirs. Since users are making judgements on the credibility of your website in much less than a second, the most logical way you can impact this decision is with design. Make sure your images look like they were taken this decade, and your fonts are either modern or timeless. Another important factor of website modernity is aspect ratio, or the ratio of the width to the height of the screen.

Websites that are difficult to navigate provide poor accessibility which leads users to seek out alternative options. Rather, it implies that a user can view a website on a computer, then pick up a phone or tablet and pick up where he left off without any confusion.

The layout of the website may look different—as it should, based on the different sized devices—but the ease of use and the overall experience should never suffer.

The companies getting it right are clearly reaping the benefits of a high quality digital presence on mobile. Although over half of web traffic is happening on mobile devices, the mobile experience is even more powerful in the local business scene.

Responsive web design also plays a massive role in this. For you, the difference between these two outcomes could be as simple as making adjustments that change the way users perceive your website the first time they interact with it. Updated on February 8th, Using Webflow for your Business? Get the most out of your site with on-Demand Management for your Webflow Website. Learn More. But very few people know just how colossal this effect actually is.

Check this out:. Free Stuff?! Launch Pad Free Sample! No company wants its website visitors to be wary of referring them. You got past the 0. Now what? Try to get to the root of the issue. Need more motivation? This makes bad UX the most significant weakness agencies identified It seems as if there may be a pattern here: User experience and design are not separate concepts.

Which leads us to statistic 9. How to fix it: When it comes to portraying credibility on a company website, step one is to have a modern, updated design that shows your company cares about its digital presence. What do I mean? It takes 2. How to fix it: The key to creating a positive first impression is a combination of extreme clarity and quality design.

Try using an F-Shaped pattern: If you want users to gravitate toward something specific on your website, try pushing that image or multimedia toward the top left of the page, and maintaining that same structure throughout the site. Eye-tracking studies analyzing user behavior have found that users mimic the way that they would read a book when they scan websites: They start at the upper part of the content area, reading horizontally from left to right, then move down and read a smaller quantity of content from left to right.