Source: http://www.free-seo-news.com/newsletter703.htm#facts
Your homepage is the most important page that visitors access on your site. This gives them direction on what to do once they arrive on the page as well as encourages them to buy your product or service. You don’t need to rank your homepage for a single term. A good example is “amazon” wherein a lot of their inner pages rank for key terms.
The real purpose of your home page should:
– Welcome page for your visitors
– tell your visitors what your product and services are all about
– guide your visitors to click your inner pages
If you seek higher rankings in search results, then the best way to do this is to optimize a page for particular search term. You can create additional pages that are related to your niche so that search engines would know what topic is relevant to your site. The idea is optimize your inner pages and create additional pages to supplement your key page with internal links.
Sometimes, a homepage may rank higher than inner pages especially if terms used to find your page are branding key words. If not-so-competitive keywords are place on your domain name were used to locate your site. Keep in mind that without links backing up your pages, it might be harder for your pages to rank compared to a competitor’s page with a good amount of quality backlinks.
Ways to optimize your homepage:
– title must include your brand and your product/service
– do not place too much distractions on your homepage to maximize click through rate, avoid placing too many links
– increase trust by adding content information and other social proof like trust seals and testimonials
