website question please

[kellytoys]

hi


just a quick question please. On the front page of my wesite I have
categories and descriptions. It is better for SEO to have descritions on the front page? I just think page would look better without.

thanks

[PrettyPaws]

Content is king. If your descriptions are keyword rich I would keep them on.

What's the site?

[jofstar]

agree with the comment above, however get rid of any content that isn't relevant to search results. Ie cut out any descriptions for products you dont get a lot of traffic for (cross sell these later) and cut descriptions down to a bare minimum.

It is also worth noting that there may be heavily competed search terms in terms of the product you sell. Sometimes you will get better traffic promoting niche product. (for instamce one of our sites does cracking trade out of womens head scarfs because no one else promotes them.

[KevPrice]

I think its better for optimisation if the user doesn't land on the homepage, but instead lands on the page of the product they are looking for via the search engines.
It means less clicks to sale. So I would focus on optimising and gathering links to your internal pages first.

In answer to your question. It would depend on the amount of copy and how often that copy appears on the site.
On the home page I would focus on general descriptions of your services or products, then make sure the anchor text to the categories is self explanatory and concise.
I would then use the description text on the category page to reinforcing in the visitors mind that they have come to the right place. (it will also reinforce to the spiders that the link text is correct).

Hope that makes sense

[ChrisFresh]

IMO it makes little sense to have the product descriptions on your homepage. Doing so will result in one of two situations:

[1] You have a small product range and list all of your products on the homepage. Unless your product range is extremely small, you will have a huge, slow loading homepage which is confusing to the user.

[2] You only list a percentage of your products on the homepage. This content will manipulate the overall content theme of your website in the eyes of the search engine spider. For example, say you sold product ranges A, B, C, D, E and only displayed ranges A and B on the homepage, your first level theme would have been distorted and so wouldn't cater as well for targeting products in the C, D and E ranges.

As an above poster mentioned. You are better off sending potential customers directly to a product page specific to the product they are searching for to improve conversion ratios. Therefore the less product specific and the more context specific your homepage is, the better.

When considering the structure of your sitemap, think of a pyramid with the upper most category as the top level and work your way down. Based on that model, you will see that specific products have no place being linked directly from the homepage. That is of course, unless they are best sellers with massive profit margins! (but that isn't good seo, that's good marketing).

If you have any further related questions, please feel free to message me.

[PrettyPaws]

IMO it makes little sense to have the product descriptions on your homepage. Doing so will result in one of two situations:

[1] You have a small product range and list all of your products on the homepage. Unless your product range is extremely small, you will have a huge, slow loading homepage which is confusing to the user.

[2] You only list a percentage of your products on the homepage. This content will manipulate the overall content theme of your website in the eyes of the search engine spider. For example, say you sold product ranges A, B, C, D, E and only displayed ranges A and B on the homepage, your first level theme would have been distorted and so wouldn't cater as well for targeting products in the C, D and E ranges.

As an above poster mentioned. You are better off sending potential customers directly to a product page specific to the product they are searching for to improve conversion ratios. Therefore the less product specific and the more context specific your homepage is, the better.

When considering the structure of your sitemap, think of a pyramid with the upper most category as the top level and work your way down. Based on that model, you will see that specific products have no place being linked directly from the homepage. That is of course, unless they are best sellers with massive profit margins! (but that isn't good seo, that's good marketing).

If you have any further related questions, please feel free to message me.

Disagree :D

(Edit - Sorry, I do agree with what you are saying with regards listing porducts but that is not the question which was asked. Debbie is listing general categories on her homepage which I think it a great idea.)

[ChrisFresh]

You are absolutely welcome to disagree. But I think you should take a closer look at her categories:

construction sets
fancy dress
educational
outdoor items
role play
valentines gifts

if you were a search engine spider, would these categories convince you that the website was 100% dedicated to children's toys?

Simply put, no.

[kellytoys]

hi thanks all for your replies, I am learning all the time.

I have changed my categories tittles to broaden them out, hope this helps.

Also my website is not 100% toys I sell baby equipment too. In fact this is the area where I am expanding. Should I have more cats on front page for baby equipment?


deb

[Tin]

Hi Chris,

There is sufficient theming in the category navigation for bots to form the notion the site is closely related to kids stuff. Looking at the 'Fancy Dress' example you point out you could consider this to be off theme in the general overall picture of the site but if you click on that link the resolving page brings the theming right back on topic again as there's links using relevant text such as...
Boy Costumes,
Girl Costumes,
Toddler Costumes and Ballgowns.

Following the links through to the destination pages they are again on topic.

A site does not have to be 100% themed to a given topic as seo is a page level mechanism, ie; document specifc to search criteria. Millions of sites spread their page/topic base and commonly pages within one site may not have a relationship with other pages in the same site.

Site theming around a single clearly identifiable product or service is the logical way if the product or service suits that approach but it's not a problem if sites don't fall into that structure. Seo'ing individual pages distinct from others is certainly no problem.

From an seo point of view the OP asks whether the descriptions on the home page are useful and they are. They're on topic but do look a bit of a mess, perhaps aligning them horizontally across the page one at a time instead of them being in two columns would look better, this would certainly prevent those thin, tall blocks of text and help it to become more readable to the visitor.

Kelly, you do need to create some text for each of your category pages. Make up around 30 words of related text. On your 'Dressing up/Fancy Dress category page talk about fancy dress as well as talking about the products that you are linking to on that page. A summary is what I mean. Try a 60/40 split. 60% of your words (20 words ish) themed around fancy dress and 40% (10 words) themed around the products this page is linking to. Then on your product page itself swap this order around with some modification so that you're using 80% of the wording directly about the product and 20% wording related to fancy dress. This will help tie the theming together of category pages to sub-category product pages.

Hope that helps

Ray