Home Page Headline & Body Text

by csantos79 on 12/22/2009

In series 1 of the How To Build A Homepage guide, we created a page title, chose the right keywords, and created a general site description. In general, the first half is all about how the search engines and your human visitors view your website though the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). In the second half of this guide we are going to create the content that your website visitors, both search engine spiders and humans will see. You’ll get tips on how to write your home page body headline (H1 tags) and the body content.

You need to make sure that your home page is clean from code clutter and misspellings. Another golden rule is to never place outbound links on your home page that points away from your website. An exception to this rule, is if that link is Google Adsense or Yahoo Publishing Network (YPN), or another site that you personally own.

Your Home Page Headline Is The First Thing They See.

Your home page headline is an anchor for your body content, and it is the first thing your website visitor will see when they land on your web page. It is important that you take extra time writing your headline, it must be very interesting to tempt the readers to stay on your site.

Home Page Headline Tip:

  • When you write your headline make sure it is no longer than 80 characters long. If you can try to keep it at 40-60 characters but no more than 80.
  • Make sure to place you primary keyword either towards the front or middle of the headline title (blend in your keyword so it sound natural).
  • Your headline must sound positive, clear, exciting and eye-catching.

Always remember that you’re writing to please two types of audiences, the search engines and people. Here is an example of a catchy title:

How To Build A Homepage That Attracts Visitors in 3 Hours

As you can see the title is catchy, within the 80 character limit, and will peak the interest of your human audience, and I have left the primary keyword in to please the search engines.

Home Page Body Text

Now that you have created your site’s page title, site description, page headline and choose profitable keywords, its now time to write your home page body content.

Now your probably asking yourself how long your homepage content should be. The real to answer to that really depends on what type of site you’re building. Every webmaster has their own way of writing content for their home page.

I have spent months researching top websites in multiple niche categories to come up with an average home page length. Below you’ll find a guideline to creating body text for your home page.

Quick Home Page Body Text Guide and Tips

  • Keep your body text short and clean.
  • An ideal length is 4 to 9 paragraphs. (average sentence length is 4 – 6 sentences)
  • If you plan to use images, 2 to 3 is ideal, and keep them medium size (250×250 or 300×300).
  • Never put links pointing out of your site.
  • Sprinkle your primary keywords in your body text (place your keywords in the opening paragraph, some in the middle and one in the closing paragraph). Make sure that your keyword blends in naturally with your text. It must not sound as if your keyword stuffing or spamming your site.
  • Make sure your primary keyword is shown in the first 100 characters of the opening paragraph.
  • Keep Your Keyword Density at or below 6%.

How To Calculate Keyword Density?

Calculating keyword density is quite simple, all you have to do is count the number of times you have used your primary keyword in your body text. Secondly you must count the number of words yotal in your body text. After you have completed both steps now divide the number of times the keyword was used by the number of words in your body text, that will give you your keyword density. Here is an example: 5 / 500 words = 0.01. That means that our page has a keyword density of 1%.

Remember not to go over 6%, and with our calculation only at 1% we can go back and sprinkle some more primary keywords around our homepage text. Just make sure that it blends in perfectly. If we do not add in some more keywords, the search engine will have a hard time deciding what our page is all about. Therefore, our home page will not get a proper ranking.

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