Index Page Content

[Johnny4B]

Mozers,

I am of the believe and as a  person who puts the utmost emphasis on the index page of any website I am trying to rank, especially with a new domain ... insuring content is relevant, structured, optimized and we have some link juice flowing in.

I find once we get the index page ranked, Google's little bots then start to index and rank accordingly the rest of the website ... and we start producing results.

We also develop websites (dare I say its where we expertise in) and unexpectantly the client has asked us to carry out SEO work additionally to their web development.

Problem lies here, their index page, has absolutely no written content at all, just one large image with a logo (Fashion Website) ...Which I identify as a huge issue as per my explanation is paragraphs one or two.

I am sure withe the many more qualified SEO experts and gurus within the SEOmoz community, you have also come across this issue

So a few questions, if you don't mind adding advice.

1 - Am I putting too much emphasize on content within the index page, in terms of indexing and actually ranking ...yes I appreciate that terms within the website will be ranked against other pages other than the index page, but will it harm us for having no content at all within the index page

2 - If so, and yes is the answer to above, how do we handle it, we have spoke with the client and he is pretty adamant that he want the index page as is, he has been through out the whole website building process.

As suggested, any advice would be really appreciated, its a difficult market to rank within a it is, and i can only see this index page making the task a lot more difficult

Cheers

John

[BlueprintMarketing]

when you say their index page. Are you referring to their homepage?

If it is only one page you may not have an issue. However, I would use my alt text wisely. In addition, I would make any words that are written at all real words. Not a photograph just place the type on top of the photo if you can.

Look up some of the ways people have ranked flash pages I know it has been done successfully I don't know how successfully but I know it has been done

I would hope the rest of the website has some content? if not I would imagine you would have a hard time ranking in Google.

http://www.vogue.com/

view-source:http://www.vogue.com/

[Johnny4B]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the reply

Yes, I mean Front Page when I refer to index page (should I take my web designer old school web designer hat off :D) .... We had suggested using text as opposed to his logo, but the font is an issue (always something) ,so unfortunately we are left with using an image.

We will optimize meta tags correctly ,as with the two alt tags we will have, we purposely decided not to use JS for the resizing of the front image full page and will target each monitor size with a different image through CSS ,thus allowing us a second alt tag along with the one for the logo.

But here also lies the problem, its essentially an e-commerce website, we have built it the website and incorporated Foxy Cart (shameless plug for amazing software for any developers out there), allowing us to dictate all URL naming extensions and so on

But content internally is not great either, but that's something we know we need to address. We will include a structured blog style section within thew website, which we are sure will give us a lot more scope in relation to targeting phrases. Its the only road we can go down in realtion to getting content within the website

But refreshingly, you give me hope if you say that it wont be detrimental to the project that lack of front page content

Regards

John

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi John,

in my opinion you will be all right if you follow the correct steps. Definitely use rich snippets

https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/

they can say a lot without showing up on your page showing up.

Another tool I would highly suggest if you want to make your words as relevant as possible is

http://scribecontent.com/

it is able to be used with Microsoft Word and via the browser alone so you do not have to be a WordPress user to take advantage of it.

If you give it a good enough description along with a high-quality site map and don't forget to name your internal links with keywords as you really don't have much to play with you have to use what you got.

If I can be of more help please let me know. I think if the website is good enough you will rank very well. I have seen flash websites for good companies rank very high and that is we know has nothing behind it in terms of what the Google bot read.

sincerely,

Thomas

[Johnny4B]

Thanks a million Thomas ...

Your advice is very much appreciated ...

I had never came across Scribe, at first I thought it was another text spinner .... but watching their video, it seems a lot more ...

Cheers again

John

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi John,

No it's very far from a text spinner it's a fantastic way to get fresh relevant content onto the site and know that the words will relate to each other and work with new Google's algorithm as well.

I'm glad I could be of help. Good luck with your site and I'm certain it will be great.

all the best,

Tom