Is content important on home page

[ClaireH-184886]

hi. i am working on a site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am trying to decide if on the second column of my site where it says uk news, if i should keep it the way it is and have content under the picture or should i get rid of the content under the picture and just have the main title.

I am wanting to know if the content under the picture is important for google and for the reader or would it be better just to have the title which is h2.

any help would be great.

[Hughescov]

Diane,

You should be careful of not writing too much content here which might replay as duplicate content on the actual linked page. This doesn't seem too much at the moment though.

I did notice that the heading and image both link to the same page, the image won't count as another link.

On the whole content is good, but it might improve your CTR if you only give a snapshot leading people to want to know more.

[ClaireH-184886]

i chose to link the image to the page as most online magazines like the sun have it where you can click the title or the image to get to the page. by having two links to the page does this slow the site down.

Also how many words would you feel is suitable to showcase for content. I want people to read a little and then think i want to read the page, but i do not want google to think that it is duplicate content. Also i keep reading that the more content you have on a page which changes then google will come and visit, not sure if this is correct in my case or not.

[Hughescov]

This won't slow down your site, it is perfectly acceptable to have both images and words linking to another page.

Yes it is always good to have relevant fresh content on your site, as you have stated. If you keep the content under UK news and it changes regularly then this should be seen as a good thing. Take the bbc website as an example, it changes content every hour! A small paragraph of content linking to a large page of content will not be seen as duplicate content.

I hope this helps.

Shaun

[ClaireH-184886]

cheers for this. it is always hard to decide how much content to put on the home page as i would like google to keep coming to the site and seeing new content. what i was worried about is, the small content i have now, not sure if you have looked again, but i am worried that the content is not enough for google to come along and say wow we have new content.