9 mistakes that you make in the home of your web
by Gaurav Gupta
THE HOME OF YOUR WEBSITE IS THE FIRST PAGE THAT YOUR USERS AND GOOGLE SEE: ARE YOU REALLY MAKING THESE MISTAKES?
Home is the main page of your website and surely (and would be totally normal) attract more than 70% of the total organic traffic, so it is very important that the first thing that your users and Google see the best looks possible, both visually and technically.
After analyzing many websites of all kinds one realizes that there are errors that are repeated as a pattern in many of them. I have selected the ones that have the highest repetition / severity ratio.
1. ERRORS IN THE MENU
The navigation menu is a very important part of a website, both SEO level and usability level. A poorly structured menu can lead the user to leave the page because he did not find what he was looking for or the Google robot does not reach the deepest parts of your website.
To have a link to the home in the menu: For that is the logo of the web, for years has been put a “start” button in the menu and the only thing that is able to duplicate a link, occupy space and distract attention Of the user.
Too many options: Hick’s law says it clearly: The more options you give a person, the more it will cost you to make a decision. “Include in the menu only links to important sections of your website.
Do not highlight the current situation: The best way to improve navigation on your website is to tell the user where you are; and there is no better way than with something as simple as highlighting in the menu where it is. You can do this by simply changing the color of the text.
Using buttons instead of text: Using text instead of buttons on the menu has two huge benefits:
- You can modify it quickly and easily through the CMS
- Google cannot read the images
Do not put the important links at the beginning: Both Google and users read a web from left to right and top to bottom; Put the links to the important sections of your website, do not put the contact page as a first link, if the user wants to contact you, he will be careful to look for it.
2. TOO MUCH TEXT / TOO LITTLE TEXT
Have you ever entered a website with huge text and read it? Never use the home page of your website as a page in which to explain in detail what your website is for (that’s the “about us” page) or leave it without text, since if you only have images Google will not see anything in her.
Instead, keep the home simple, add a little text where you explain what your webpage is, where you can add the main keyword of the web.
3. USE A GIANT SLIDER
I am in favor of not even using slider due to poor performance that produces both SEO level and usability level, as well explained in this post Search Engine Land:
Too many H1: Normally each image of a carousel carries an H1 tag, which means that in the home there are as many H1s as images in it. This causes the keywords to be devalued.
Increases the load time: And the loading time is very important at the SEO level, the more elements / images added to a page the later it will take to load.
The important content is pushed towards the footer: The important thing of your web is the content and / or the articles, give them to the user and to Google as soon as possible and in the face.
Distracts the user: It is what in the previous article calls “megaphone effect” that is nothing more than a distraction of the important thing of the web.
4. THERE IS NO CONTACT PAGE
It is incredibly desperate to get to a web where you want to contact them and find no way to do so. It is imperative to add an access to the contact page in the home: either in a corner or in the footer.
There are many websites that use social networking as a contact page, but what if I do not trust you to write to Facebook or even have Facebook?
5. THERE ARE NO SOCIAL BUTTONS
I now do not conceive a web page that is not on social networks, considering that what the hell does it cost to add links to your social networks? The number of users who use social networks as a means to find out about the brand, as a contact or simply to check the relevance of this is enormous.
This is more serious if we analyze it in blogs: there are many blogs that do not have buttons to share in your articles do you really expect from my mobile to copy the URL, I go to Twitter, paste it and look for your user to name you?
6. DO NOT LINK DEEP PAGES
It is very important that Google give you access to the deeper pages of the web from the home, since usually these are usually the most important (e.g. articles in an ecommerce), this way you ensure that you reach them and do not run out of crawling time on your page sooner than you should.
You can do this by adding links to the featured articles in your ecommerce or the most shared posts on your blog.
7. FILL IN THE HOME OF THINGS
This is a sum of two points that we have seen in this same post: the “megaphone effect” and Hick’s law that states that the more options a user has later on making a decision.
If a user enters your website and finds a lot of links, images, a slider and featured articles the only thing you are going to get is to drive him crazy and to go to another web to find a simpler way to find what he wants.
8. PUTTING (TOO MANY) ADS
Bad idea, from any point of view. Google has already made it clear that websites that make excessive use of ads on their website will lose positioning power over those that do not.
From the user’s point of view, it is both a way to lose confidence in the web and a way to click on the ad and leave your page. I’m sure you’re thinking “but ads are a very important source of income for my website”, I do not say that you remove all the ads, but leave the just to not get to annoy your users, because if you do not have users, who will click on the ads?
9. FOOTER
And we arrived at the great forgotten in any web: the footer. Although it seems that being in a site that almost no user access, it is very important to have it optimized well:
Use it as a menu: The footer is not the menu and it is very unlikely that any user will use it this way, therefore, do not add the same links in the footer as in the menu and do not add (it is more common than it can Look) links to all sections of your website, Google gives VERY little importance to these links and what you are getting is to dilute the Link Juice between both link and increase the size of the web.
Use it as SEO: Google makes clear with Penguin that the links in the footer, in addition to having no value can end up causing a penalty if they include links with anchor text too directed to a keyword.
In short, use the footer simply to help the user to find the not so important pages of your website and that are supposed to be in the footer: contact, cookies law, privacy policy and about us.
I hope your website does not have all these faults and if you have one it has served you to realize.