Making a Good Website First Impression

When you recognize the value of a farmer's approach to SEO, you can start to see the irony in how most people approach SEO like hunters. They want to get lots of traffic to their home page for a few well-researched, prize keywords. This is going exactly opposite of how search engines work, as they try match many unique search phrases with many content-rich sub-pages.

A common consequence of upside down SEO expectation is too much emphasis on the home page as the first impression page, when in fact it's every page other than the home page that are most likely to be the first impression page. Not nearly enough time is spent considering the overall impression and positioning of a sub-page when it functions as the first page viewed--which they usually are.

Our May 2005 newsletter "Who's Your Homepage" talk more about viewing sub-pages as surrogate home pages in terms of first impressions.


So you see there's no big secret to search. Produce lots compelling content regularly. And as we talked about last month, be accurate and dispassionate about characterizing your titles. Translate a little to match how people search. And from time-to-time review your results in order to tweak. Keep it up, and like any diligent farmer, you'll soon enjoy a rich harvest of search traffic.