Search engine optimization these days is more competitive and difficult than ever. With hundreds of potential methods and tactics to consider, it can be all too easy to forget about any one strategy. From web design considerations to content creation elements, there is a lot to balance. A website’s homepage matters just as much as any other part of SEO and also often drives the first impression visitors will have of your brand. If you want to perfect the art of SEO, then there is no better place to start than with the homepage. Today, we’ll discuss which major elements you’ll want to ensure are in place in order to have ideal SEO on your homepage.

Title Tags

Any homepage that is worth its weight in SEO gold should have an optimized title tag segment. Search engines provide you with a few dozen characters via the title tag to provide a succinct description of the homepage, which will help identify your brand to search engines and search engine users alike. This is where you want to focus on the most important elements of your brand, ideally by giving a description that is no more than a few words. The specific words can be tuned to be in line with your most popular products or most targeted keywords.

Meta Descriptions

Any homepage should also have a meta description to accompany its title tag. In the meta description, you’ll be able to insert approximately 150 characters. It is here that you’ll want to further elaborate on the concepts and words that you used in your title tag, but in a bit more detail. This will be the description that people see when your page appears in search results, so be sure that you’re using accurate descriptors (and not just pinging noise in the form of random keywords).

Proper Navigation

In order to ensure that both search engines and visitors can adequately navigate your website and find all of its pages, it is essential that you have a simple yet thorough navigation menu that allows all of your pages to be accessed. The use of internal linking via navigational elements is crucial to long-term SEO success, and it also drastically decreases bounce rates among those who land on your homepage. Since they can find what it is they’re looking for quickly, fewer people leave (note: a higher bounce rate can harm other SEO efforts).

Access to Content

From the homepage, your visitors should be able to access more than just mere links to other pages. Your homepage should feature a variety of content offerings and elements that make it a feature-rich interface for those using it. From a list of your most recent posts to social media widgets, the homepage is the perfect place through which to generate more links to your various outlets and to showcase the types of content that people can expect from your website. This is also a great approach from an SEO perspective, as it helps ensure that search engines don’t view your homepage as an instance of thin content that’s pinging noise and keywords alone.