How much text should be on the home page?

Just curious to get some collective thought on this, I’m in favor of just the text that is necessary, while some people I know think for SEO purposes, having lots of text is better. What do you think?

Take these two websites, do you think there is not enough or just enough text on the home page?

http://tinyurl.com/yhxg2t2

It depends on how many important keywords you want to focus on. And it should be written for the reader, not the search engines.

Not if the text isn’t relevant, unique or useful. As (the second part) of the previous post said, write your homepage content for users not search engines. That goes for both the quality and the quantity of text.

actually i am confuse is thai important how amny words should be there in one page is there are more words it affect something like pagerank.
Regards,Anup Kanwar

It all depends on you. if you like your site then stick with it, but I would recommend using at least 4 keywords or phrases for the home page and you should have enough content to make the page scroll at least a half a page down.

Making sure to target your keywords is important, but seriously - putting a lot of text on a page (especially your index page) is a sure-fire way to scare off your visitors. It doesn’t matter if your text is brilliantly written…nobody is going to read it anyway.

Keep it simple.

You just need to write as much as is necessary to get your point across. Dont pad it out just to try and impress the search engines.

I believe it might not be required just making too large homepages with a lot of texts and paragraphs because your total site’s structure would add values to your rankings. You know, Google will find the fresh contents and reward you even if they are not directly posted on your homepage.

I think it makes a site look desperate for visitors if it throws in tons of text for seo. It’s the old adage of quality over quantity. Spending some time finding the right keywords is probably the best practice.

Good point. The content on the home page is to engage the visitor. Too much text, especially text that goes on about very little, gets me to the Back button pretty quick. Engage the visitor and ranking will come naturally.

I would say that the balance is about right on both of those … in that when I look at them, I neither think “So what’s all this about then?” nor “Whoa, too many words!”. There’s enough information there to draw me further into the site, if it’s something I’m interested in, but not so much that it puts me off.

The first rule of optimising for search engines is “don’t talk about search engines”. Build the site for people, and search engines will pick it up from there. People visit your website, people buy your products, people use your services, people pay you money. You might be number 1 on Google, but Googlebot won’t be signing up to buy a new office, and if your site doesn’t work for people, it doesn’t work.