The front page of your website should accomplish a couple of things. First, it needs to be able to quickly grab a visitor's interest. Second, it needs to be set up so that search engines can easily and properly index it.

I generally have clients come up with about twenty keywords that they want search engines to index their site under. Then I have them include as many of those as they can in their front (or home) page without sounding unnatural.

The structure I advise in general for home pages is one or two paragraphs with 2-4 sentences apiece. This should then be followed by a bulleted list or two of some sort. This will serve both our first and second purposes. For search engines, not having tons and tons of text will give more relative weight to the keywords you use. This will make your site rank relatively higher in the search engine's results for those keywords.

For visitors to your site, a short paragraph or two followed by a bulleted list will make it quickly obvious to them whether your site is worth investigating in further detail. For that reason, the two paragraphs of text should be a general summary of the rest of the site and of your business. This is not really the place to tell a detailed story. Instead, you can mention the story and provide a link to it elsewhere on your site.

If your front page write-up is effective, it will benefit your business. A higher search engine ranking and visitors who explore more of your site will be the result.

Tim is the owner and senior web designer at T&S Web Design. His company has developed and maintained website for dozens of small businesses and organizations. Tim also maintains a blog with free website advice for small business owners, GetASiteOnline.com.

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