7 Ways on How to Optimize your Blog’s Homepage?

7 Ways on How to Optimize your Blog’s Homepage? - One need not explicitly state the prominence of a website’s or blog’s homepage. The saying – ‘First impression is the best impression’ holds perfectly well in the online world too. The impression your blog’s homepage sets on the mind of a new visitor determines whether or not he/she is going to be a returning visitor.

In the blogging arena, bounce rate is a huge concern. This too, is often attributed to your homepage’s competence in retaining the blog’s traffic. The homepage is the face of your blog that brands you and your service, and acts as a lead conversion funnel for your online entrepreneurship. Hence paying special attention to the look and feel of your blog’s homepage is just inevitable.

Follow these wise ways to optimize your blog’s homepage to make the most out of it.

Navigation bar for the dummies – The menu bar must be designed in a way that the dumbest visitor finds it quite intuitive. Not only in terms of usability does your navigation bar come into play, but also in defining your blog’s search engine optimization, it plays it vital. So deal with it wisely and make the most of it. Imagine yourself bumping into a website that has weird unrelated or incomprehensible tabs in it. How compelling would the blog seem to you?

Show content snippets – One feature of the age old blogs that I always hated was that the blog posts were displayed in such a way that I was bound to scroll down through one or more complete posts in order to explore the preceding posts. By God’s grace now blogs come with summarized posting feature that shows to a visitor customized snippets of each post thus allowing the visitor to quickly glance through the summery for each title and quickly select the one he wants to go through. This way the reader sticks on to your blog for longer, as he is given the chance to have a quick glance at most of posts which inturn makes him read more than one for sure.

Call to action – Most bloggers perceive the call to action button as the magic gateway to their prosperity and persuade the visitors with the call to actions by placing them here and there and possibly everywhere. Seldom do bloggers comprehend that this could repel visitor from your blog. Placing call to action buttons/links abruptly may make you seem like a pushy marketer; and you well that all of us snub them. Rather, provide value to your readers through your content such that they themselves search for the call to action to get into business with you.

Place Ads sensibly – Just like the call to action links, ads placed everywhere or popping onto the screen out of nowhere can cause huge traffic loss to your blog. It is understandable that ads are one of the main sources of income for your blog. But I wonder if your readers (especially the 1st timers) would care about your income at all. Ensure that there are no ads or no more than one ad on your blog’s homepage. You can to some extent experiment with ad placement in the other branched pages though. Even if you end up having more than one ad on the homepage, avoid placing all of them above the fold.

Brag – Yes you read it right. I meant brag about your service excellence. You can do this by putting to display the awards you won in your niche, testimonials you got from the big wigs of the industry and client base that includes some well known names. Doing this will project your too as a big player in the niche and get you’re the PRO tag. Remember? People always want to be associated with the PROs and get the best work done for them.

Avoid over-optimization – Bear in mind that implementing keywords in your homepage is just as vital as implementing them in all the other pages. But stay away from the temptation of over using keywords. Use your keywords and their synonyms through H1 tags, page title, domain name, categories, footer and menu bar items.

Don’t mix it up – Do not use your homepage to tell the whole story of your services. Limit your homepage to a couple testimonials at max. Rather dedicate your homepage to let people know what is in your blog for them. Show them the content. Link to an ‘About’ page for pitching your services instead. Snub pitching advertising opportunities on your site. Have a separate page for them which is linked to from the homepage.

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