An Ultimate Guide For Homepage SEO For Higher Rankings

Whether you own a blog, an e-commerce store, or a corporate website, a homepage is a decisive factor in your SERPs. After all, it's one of those pages on your website where every visitor will visit once to get an understanding of your business. Hence, you shouldn't zoom past your homepage SEO in your SEO efforts at any cost!

Interestingly, optimizing your site's homepage is more or less identical to how you are optimizing the other pages of your website you're determined to get better rankings for. In this article, I'm going to present to you some of my tried and tested homepage SEO tips you'd surely love to implement. So, let's dive in without further ado.

Here's Why Homepage Optimization Is Important

Your homepage or landing page acts as a user guide for your website. In most cases, the visitor will directly land on the homepage for a better understanding of you and your business. If not directly, they will certainly visit the homepage after skimming through the other pages.

If not this, a well-curated and SEO-friendly homepage lets the search engines know who you are and they use this information to mark your entry into the SERPs.

So, this proves why focusing on your homepage is as important as sipping a cup of coffee during late night work!!

And Here's How You'd Do It!

Every top-rated SEO service provider will implement the following optimization strategies to your homepage to rank it higher as it's the one that absorbs all the powers and rankings from the rest of the pages.

Homepage title

An "incomplete" homepage title is the most common issue with websites. By "incomplete", I mean that merely having your website or business name isn't sufficient as the homepage title. You must utilize all the available 60 characters to blend your competitive keywords and business information to complete your homepage title. This is a creative and SEO-friendly way to give more information to the users and search engines about your website or business.

Here are some examples of such homepage titles.

In the above image, notice how Google has blended their keyword PPC Online Advertising to help the user achieve their marketing goals.

The below image depicts another wonderful homepage title from Moz.

Look how Moz has used one of their primary keywords SEO Software next to their name.

In another example from RankHawn, see how they have blended their target keyword SEO Company In Bangalore in the title space.

In a nutshell, for a fully optimized homepage title, here's my checklist.

Utilize all 60 characters to blend the keyword and business information in one sentence.

Place the target keyword at the beginning of the title.

Refrain from confusing the search engine by using too many keywords. That one keyword you're known for would suffice.

Try adding your website or business name at the beginning of the title.

These tips will give you the perfect homepage title!

Don't forget the meta description

Just below your website's title, you have a small description called meta description whose main purpose is to give the visitor an insight into your business or website. Its ideal length is 150-160 characters.

Here's an example.

See how RankHawn has included its competitive keyword with other useful information to entice the visitors.

Note that Google may display its meta description and not yours in case it's too short i.e. less than 130 characters or too long i.e. more than 160 characters.

Hence, focus on the length of your meta description and the content you'll add to it.

Next is the H1 tag

The next big thing is the homepage's H1 tag.

The H1 tag is normally located at the top of each page and each page should have one (only one) H1 tag. While in most themes, you get the option to choose the title tag, others come configured to display the page title in the H1 tag.

Optimize the homepage images for SEO

A homepage is incomplete without images! Images make the page appear less boring and pass the information to your audience in a better and efficient way.

Furthermore, images also demonstrate to the search engine crawlers what your website or business is about.

However, you can't simply add images and expect yourself done! Below is a checklist of what type of images crawlers usually expect on your website pages, including the homepage.

All images must have an ALT text to describe the image in case the image doesn't load due to any reason.

Add your keywords in the ALT text in a natural tone.

The best SEO practices suggest using text-free images. You can, however, add the required text using CSS and HTML.

Important note: Similar to image optimization, optimize your website or business logo.

Your homepage should load in under 3 seconds!

Statistically, 40% of users tend to quit a website that doesn't load in under 3 seconds. This slow loading speed will ruin all your efforts in preparing an ideal homepage and ultimately take away your potential leads.

Check out my following tips to optimize your homepage (or any page) loading speed.

Use a fast server from a reliable host like WordPress, VPS, etc.

Optimize every image to be presented on the homepage for its file format and size.

Use Google's PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site's or any page's loading speed.

For videos, make sure they are hosted on a reliable platform like YouTube and embedded to your site.

Lastly, the software should be up to date.

So, these are the top 5 and most important homepage SEO optimization tips.

The final takeaway

Besides the above 5 suggestions, there is a lot more you can do with your website's homepage and achieve the best rankings on Google. Still, if you need any assistance, our SEO services are there for your assistance at every step.