Don’t think Home Pages require a different design, or Are we still thinking about the Web as a collection of books?
If you’ve been following Dangerous Thinking’s Twitter feed, you would probably have noticed last week that I’d been pondering a Meatball Sundae.
Not anything to do with my interest in food and cooking, you will understand, and certainly not a recipe from my food blog, but Seth Godin’s latest piece of wisdom on marketing.
Although I’m quoting Godin out of context, this quote resonated strongly with me:
Google and the other search engines have broken the world into little tiny bits. No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them. Seth’s Blog
Yet so many people in the Web industry still worry about the number of words we, as SEOs, want to put on the Home page, arguing that people will look at the page and go off somewhere else. Or that the home page has to be different visually. That’s old media thinking – a world where books and magazines need their covers designed in a specific way so they leap off the shelf.
This thinking, then, leads to the thought that the Web is a collection of books.
As SEOs, we optimize copy on a whole range of pages to target selected key phrases. People who search for content arrive at the optimized page, not the Home page, simply because that content matches their search more closely – it’s more relevant. As search engines become more effective and site owners and their SEOs become better at working with them, the concept of the Home page as a magazine or book cover cover will become weaker and weaker.
Still not wholly convinced? Think about PPC. Earlier this year Google changed the rules to stop advertisers directing traffic to the home page (or any generic landing page); instead we must have relevant, good quality, landing pages.
So both Organic and PPC/SEM traffic is coming at the site from an indeterminate angle. Or as Godin put it:
No one visits a Web site’s home page anymore – they walk in the back door, to just the place Google sent them.
So forget about a door for your site. Just make sure everyone is welcomed with the information they’re looking for.
(BTW, I know I’m over-compensating by aligning myself with Godin. I know that lots of traffic is directed to the Home page.)
Are you suggesting that we abandon the book metaphor altogether? Should all navigation be done by search and links alone? I guess Wikipedia is the model to follow, though even there, topic summaries and lists provide some structure.
Well, a book cover is there to sell in a retail environment.
And, at the same time, most people don’t just open a book at random and start reading from there. It’s understood from the structure and usage how the content works.
On the Web, as search engines get better at ferreting out and indexing content, people are increasingly likely to find themselves starting anywhere else but the Home page, so I’m challenging the mindset that says a site has to have a (book-like) cover that is design-heavy and doesn’t look like the inside pages.
I’m not comfortable with the idea of ‘abandon(ing) the book metaphor altogether’, though. There’s surely enough in common between Web sites and books to make that not entirely useful?
Ah. Yes I agree with that. Splash pages and spinny logos have largely disappeared, but the old habits are still clinging on. What you’re saying is that a home page is just another page, it doesn’t need to be eye catching because that’s not how people find things on the web. In book terms its the introduction, or the table of contents, not the cover.
That’s kind of the flip side of what I’m saying.
Following your lead, I find myself arguing that every page should be eye-catching because it may be the place people enter.