Seo Questions

[GroovyFish]

I am in the process of re-designing a website for a family retail business. I would like to use the home page to highlight several products. Customers would then click on a product, or on the "shop" link to enter the shopping cart.

 

The home page will then be all images, no text. I'll use alt tags on the images and title on the links and meta tags, etc.

 

SO my question is how bad is this from an SEO standpoint, not having any real content (text) on my home page?

 

Thanks!

[hindixp]

I think if you are not using any text on your pages you can be pushed real down on your search results.

For those who can get links to their site from sites with good PR can do better this way but getting such traffic is not that easy.

[GroovyFish]

Thanks hindixp,

 

I already have several link back from several sites, a couple of which are very popular. And I am working on more.

 

So, if I have that, should I not worry so much about not having content (text) on my home page?

 

How do websites that use a flash intro deal with it? Or are they wrong for having a flash page?

[Deverill]

If you design your page very strongly you might have a chance. You'll have to use the title tag, meta tags, alt attributes, etc. to their fullest. With the relevant links back to your site the search engines have a clue what your site is about.

 

Remember that SEs don't look at the pictures so they have to have something to determine what your page is about.

 

Sometimes sites with a splash screen or all flash use tricks to put text "way down" on the page or in invisible colors so the engines can see it. I highly recommend against this because you may be penalized and it's not worth it.

 

Also remember that nothing says they have to get to your front page first. If you sell widgets and wickets and they do a search for "sticky wickets" and end up at your 2nd page that deals with the wickets you sell then you have won. Search engines don't read sites but rather each individual page which stands on its own merit. Make sure you optimize those pages to rank highly in the engines and if the visitor never sees your front page but buys things from you then who cares.

[GroovyFish]

Thanks so much for the reply Jim! It definately helps!

 

Right now I am doing a little research on session ID's and if it is going to be a problem to have a customer enter the cart by-passing the carts main page. If I highlight a product on the main page, I want them to click it and take them right to the product page. If it's going to cause a problem, then this is all mute.

 

I have designed my home page in photoshop, one large image that I am going to slice up. And I was wondering, I was going to slice it up into about 5 parts, but maybe, it would be better to slice it up even more (more opportunities for alt tags) or is that completely stupid

 

The shop part actually resides in a subdomain, anyway I can put a sign in robots.txt ...like a BIG RED SIGN, "Hey Robot..GO THIS WAY" LOL.

 

Thanks again... More questions to come I am sure!

[gm1234]

The sad part about search engines is that they cannot read images or text written on images. But they can pick up alter texts. What you can do is develop seperate pages that have valid content related (also keyword rich) to your website, like faq's, articles etc and give links to the frontpage from those pages. These pages are sure to rank well in search engines. Although don't do too much of these pages. These pages are also called doorway pages; but they won't be penelized until they provide valid information and are in moderate propotions.

[Deverill]

One more thing to be careful of if you take this approach is that duplicate content on multiple pages is an easy way to get one or all pages dropped from the search engines.

 

As for backlinks, this really only applies to Google. The others look at links from other sites but don't put nearly enough weight on it to be successful with that being your only beneficial feature.

 

This is the very reason I removed all splash pages from my sites and refuse to use them now unless one of my clients wants to pay me well for it and accept low rankings... which they aren't. They look really nice, but how many books would you buy at the bookstore if they had no words on the cover and only nice pictures? How would you even know what they are about? It's very much the same with web sites.

[GroovyFish]

I only read books for the pictures, not the words.

 

Wait, I may have that backwards

 

This SEO stuff really hurts my head. As I said at the beginning, I am setting up a new shopping cart. It's dynamic so all the urls will be query strings. I have been reading, in another forum heated discussions on whether this is a bad thing or not. And if search engines will index them (effectively) or not.

 

So, I thought that maybe using a splash page would help out to some extent. And when I started designing it, I decided I really wanted it to be an eye-catcher with pictures of some of our most popular products. We sell food products, so it's less about the words and more about the presentation. If it was computers, I would want to read all the specs and have lots of information about it. If it's food, a good picture of the product is probably going to sell it better.

 

Ok..I am just thinking out loud here and rambling.

 

Thanks for all your information Jim! I really appreciate it and I am reconsidering a splash page.

 

If you have a minute, I can PM you a link to the mockup of the splash page and maybe give me your thoughts on what I had planned.

 

Thanks so much!

[Deverill]

Yeah, headache for sure.

 

From what I've read, query strings aren't a problem as long as there are not too many parameters and you're not using session IDs. The session ID makes a problem for the spiders it seems.

 

You definitely want to have pictures of food! I love pictures of food. Ok, ok, I love food period! The secret is to design it so that you can have some good content as well or bring in search engine folks another way.

 

I don't think of my stuff as exceptional in any way, but to see what I did when I got rid of the splash page check out www.grandslamkw.com and see how I managed to get some boat and water photos in with quite a bit of content. Again, not an example of greatness, just one thing that I did that seems to work pretty well.

 

Remember too that you usually don't "sell" from your home page. Perhaps a small (half page or less) but very enticing photo will hook them and then when they go to see the chicken products or prepared foods or whatever else categories you may have for your particular products you can really wow them with a huge pic or collage of all the things in that classification and then go on to more pages of smaller photos and spiderable text.

 

You, or anyone else here, are more than welcome to PM me. If it's something I can do I will be glad to help as much as I can.