I’ve been looking at a lot of responsive websites lately.
This morning I thought I came up with a pretty good design for a home page. It included links to key areas of my website:
Services
Portfolio
Articles
Contact Us
Visually it would look similar to this one…
Everything seemed fine until I started thinking about SEO…
When a search engine like Google crawls my responsive website and see “Services” it isn’t going to see that I do “Responsive Web Design” or “SEO” or “Mobile Apps” or whatever.
On a desktop layout, I would just have a paragraph/bullet points below “Services” so both users and search engines would get exactly what I do. But on mobile you don’t really have the real-estate.
I could expand things out and make my home page really like 20 pages long and make users scroll and scroll to read all about the specifics of what “Services” entails. Google would love me for this, but I don’t like the idea of a website that is one never-ending page!!
So how do I change the content of a RWD to make sure I still have excellent SEO?
The reason I like the design/screen-shot above is that it is very simple and easy for users to read, comprehend, and act upon. (Everything fits even on a tiny iPhone4.)
Unfortunately, that brevity also seems like it would hurt me with SEO, because search engines wouldn’t give me points for “Responsive Web Design” on my home page as all they would see is “Services”.
How can I have a home page that is streamlined and easy to use, but which is also content-rich and helps me to get on page #1 of people’s searches?
As far as SEO is concerned then it is essential to have separate webpages itemised in a sitemap.xml and not necessary to have every webpage called from the home page.
Do not forget that all webpages do require links from other webpages further up the tree.
As mentioned without knowing what else is on the page it is difficult to guess. If your home page has an introduction then include links to specific pages.
The “tree” reference is similar to a single link to a pagination blog page with numerous blogs.
The main page doesn’t need to, nor should it, have the same content as sub-pages.
What difference does it make if someone is searching for “blue widgets” and goes to the widget page instead of the home page first?
Up to you. There are a lot of “parallax” type sites where everything is on one page. “Trendy” but I don’t care much for them.
Good question. I thought it mattered to Google. If you have a bakery, shouldn’t people land on your website because you have enough content related to your “bakery” on your home page?
I agree.
But am I also wrong for needing to dissect things up into specialized pages like in the old desktop days?
Then again, if they come to your home page, you only have a few seconds to catch their attention.
I guess I need to stress “Responsive Design” first and foremost, then hope they see my portfolio and articles.
I spent all day drawing this out on paper, so no!
I have several layouts that look decent, but am torn on how to best organize what I described above.
What makes this more challenging to is that I am trying to avoid creating a “mini-me” website that fits onto an iPhone4. Was hoping to make something from the ground up that feels more “mobile”. So, for example, I am not rushing to create a header with a menu bar…
If you only had one, which group of info would you place on the home page…
When you get your text file up to copy-paste quality, please DO
I would use names that made sense to me in hopes that others knew them the same way.
Then, in addition to the main navigation have as briefly as possible “descriptions” of each section.
A sentence or short paragraph at most - but “catchy” and which links to that sections page. .
Trust me, you will never ever see complete agreement as to what is “best”
Anyway, We really need that link. if we’re going to be able to really try and help.
As @Mittineague has already said, what matters is that you have good content relating to your different services on your website; that does not have ti be on your home page.
You seem to be in danger of falling into one of the most common errors here and trying to design your page for Google. Design your page (desktop and mobile views) for human visitors. If it works well for them, it will work just fine for Google.
You can still have your descriptive paragraph on your mobile homepage. But put it “below the fold” after the nav links. Another option is to put the paragraphs in roll-outs, so mobile users can expand and read more if they want to.
I’m not really sure how Google behaves in regard to content hidden by media queries, whether it affects mobile serps; possibly it does. I know as a human web user, it can be annoying when certain info is not available on a mobile version.
