Advanced Access Blog

The top of your home page is the most important section of your website - are you letting that prime real estate reach its potential?

Open your website in a new window… go ahead, I’ll wait.

Next take note of what is visible on your home page without scrolling.  What do you see?  All images?  Slide shows?  Text?  Your name?  Buttons (your navigation)?  It also wouldn’t hurt to make a mental note of what your eye was drawn to first.

What you have in this section of your site is the first thing your visitors will see and the first thing that search engines will see.  If there are only images or slide shows that might be a highlight for visitors, but it’s nothing for search engines.  And herein often lies the internal struggle: what’s more important?

Unfortunately, as most things in life, it’s not quite that simple.  You need to strike a balance on your website to make the most of the space you have.

Recently, Mike Wilton, a Premium Marketing Specialist for Advanced Access, shared with me his thoughts on balancing out this space.  Using slide shows as his example, he offers some great suggestions that I hope you will find useful.

Visualizing your way to better rankings…

With a few adjustments to the home page you can include your slide shows where your visitors will see them, while still keeping them out of the way of search engine spiders finding your important content. The best way to do this is to create a multi-column table. Search engines crawl tables one column at a time, top to bottom, and left to right. In a two column table the spider crawls the left column from top to bottom first and then proceeds to the right column. Therefore the best course of action would be to include all of your content in the left column and add your slideshows in the right. This ensures that the search engines see your content before they reach your slideshows.

For those of you who have a wealth of home page content this may not work as well for you; especially if the content continues well past the slide show, or slide shows. In this case it may be best to put part of your content in a multi-column table with the slide shows and then continue the rest of the content below that table allowing the rest of the text to span the width of the page.

From Mike’s example we can see that there are ways to keep the best of both worlds happily coexisting on your home page.  Other ideas include changing from a slide show in this scenario to a static image.  That takes up less code, and you can add an alt tag to the image to optimize it for search engines.

We can help you with rearranging items on your home page to make them work better for you - just give us a call or post in the forums for ideas.  Not sure how to use tables or even begin, remember, we can help with that too.

If you want more advice for improving your website’s visibility to the search engines and how to convert leads, contact us to ask about our Website Marketing Services.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 5:38 pm and is filed under Content, Search Engine Tips, Weekly Marketing Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.