Does it matter what pages on your website your content is on?

[rammellconsult]

In term of search-engine optimisation, does it make a difference if your front page contains minimal information (including metadata etc), with lots of useful information scattered across other web page within the domain, or will it result in more hits if the front page (e.g. www.mydomain.com/index.html) includes lots of relevant information and metadata?

I want to "clean-up" my front page to make it less busy but am concerned that this may make my web site "more difficult" to locate. As search engine spiders supposedly crawl through a complete site, I assume it shouldn't make a difference. But does it???

Thanks.

Eldin.

[yorganic]

The home page is normally considered the most important page of a site unless you have lots of inbound links to another area of your site that is more popular.

Without having seen your site and as a very basic rule of thumb I would suggest the following....

If you have lots of Google PageRank and you are operating in a market that it is not massively competitive then go-ahead clean up your home page and ensure there is good navigation to the other pages of your site. Content is something you can quickly re-instate if you lose rankings.

If you do not have lots of Google PageRank then you need to seek advice from a specialist in SEO to look at how best to deploy existing content, introduce new content, modify navigation and code etc as well as build up links and PageRank all within whatever budget you may wish to spend.

Hope that helps.

[Nick Dyer]

I've seen situations in the past where an index page has had very little content, but an internal page had more.
The internal page was ranked higher than the index page but did not appear well in the search engine results for the subject.
I would recommend weighting the front page as your most important window to the world, you can then use the internal pages to clarify and expand on your window content.

[matt1biz]

It's better to structure a site into a clear hierarchy, with different content being divided into distinct categories, sub-categories and pages.

You can then target internal pages for more specific keywords, which enable you target a much wider range of phrases in the long-run.

Consider a site selling DVDs. It's impossible to fit milions of phrases onto a singel index page.

The index page for example should be optimised for the most general phrases such as DVDs or Buy DVDs.

Subcategories can then be optimised for more general phrases such as adventure DVS, comedy DVDs, horror films etc

Product pages should be optimised for phrases basen on on the specific DVD itself.

[www.infoebookstore.co.uk]

I believe the homepage is most important and I am told if your homepage has a high PR then this rubs off on the sub pages.

I do however find this search result very strange...

Google Search for Altrincham FC

[yorganic]

Originally Posted by www.infoebookstore.co.uk

I do however find this search result very strange...

There's nothing strange in that in the slightest. The home page contains virtually no content and most people who use the site have probably linked to the main page of content. Bear in mind also that this type of site appeals to the Myspace/social networking users and there may be lots of voluntary links out there. Why link to the home page when there is no content.

In terms of the actual ranking in Google also bear in mind Google ranks pages on spyware in its toolbar and assessing how long a user spends on a page. It's not enough to move a site from obscurity to page 1 of the results but it can move pages slightly especially in comparison to other pages within a site.

It then doesn't help that you have several domains in use with the site but, thats another story....