Blog home page and SEO

[BobAnderson]

Why do most blog owners not put content that is unique to the home page above the fold before posts begin?

[crackingmedia]

Hi Bob

I am not sure I understand the question you are asking. Please can you give some more information and perhaps an example.

Peter

[DarinPirkey]

I'm not sure exactly what you mean about non unique content above the fold.  Are you saying that it's static information or images there and not continually changing?  Please feel free to elaborate.

Here are some general thoughts.

Thinking about user experience and seo, I come from the school of thought that people who come to your homepage first are generally coming there because they were referred to your brand.  What I mean by that is if your homepage is your "brands" landing page and subpages are generally specific topics that don't necessarily pertain to your brand.  For example.  If I told you that the best seo tools in the world come from Moz.com, you would go to moz.com and check them out to see for yourself.  But, If I told you that there was a great post on moz.com about international SEO, I would generally guide you to a sub-page of that site.  Many blog owners what to tell the story of their brand on their homepage and don't really worry about "seo" for that page as they will naturally get SEO through brand mentions and links to their homepage.  I pretty much never rank homepages for keywords.  I know many people do but I generally don't focus on one.  I focus on links to my homepage that have brand mentions and a pretty diverse link profile.

[KaneJamison]

Hey Bob,

The short answer is that most people don't do this because they don't know that they should, or they haven't gotten around to it.

Static homepages with well-written introductory content are almost always better than a dump of 5-10 blog post teasers, even for blogs that don't have any other function than publishing blog posts. For examples of good custom homepages on websites that only feature blog content, I'd point you towards these examples:

• http://mywifequitherjob.com/
• http://www.seattlehomestead.com (this is my site, but I think it's a good example of custom homepage/introduction content)