How important is your home page?

Traditionally - if you can have traditionally on the Internet - the home page has played a hugely important role in presenting a business to visitors. It's where you tell people what you are and what you do, why they want to do business with you, and how they can follow links to more information.

With the rising importance of Google and other search engines, the importance of the home page is dropping. Web surfers are canny enough to put the terms into a search engine that will get them straight to the page they want, without visiting the home page first. So if you sell cheeses, and your visitors know they want Cheddar cheese, they'll search on that term and produce a list of pages relevant to Cheddar cheese - that will hopefully include yours.

What does this mean for your web site?

First, it means that your individual pages need to stand on their own just a little bit more. So each page needs links that will ease a sale - how to buy, order now, more information and so on.

Second, it means that your keywords need to be as relevant as possible for each page. You want anyone searching for Cheddar cheese to find your Cheddar cheese page on the first page of results. That requires thinking about what terms work for your business, but aren't used by multiple other Cheddar cheese vendors. Google's free keyword tools can help you with this - you don't have to pay for ads to use this tool.