The content on your home page is an important tool for search engine optimisation, but many site owners are reluctant to put too much information on this page. Many wish only to have graphical content and leave the text for inner pages.
So are they right? Google expert, Matt Cutts, responded recently to the question: “More or less content on a home page?”
Matt stresses the importance of having sufficient textual content on a home page for the Googlebot to find and index. Search engine robots can only extract information from text; they cannot see content in images. He therefore recommends that your home page should contain textual information to allow the Googlebots to establish the content of your site. This should include adding alt tags to images and giving images descriptive file names.
However, beware! There is such thing as too much content. As Matt points out, if you have a 20MB home page then this will take a long time to download and visitors on a slow connection are going to get annoyed. What he doesn’t mention is that one of the ways that Google judges your web page is by its load time. A fast load time is a big green tick in their checklist when ranking your site!
In other words, Matt Cutts’ advice is have plenty of text content, but don’t overdo it. If you do this could adversely affect your ranking.
Here’s the video response:
