When looking at your website from an SEO perspective, the homepage is typically your strongest page. This being the case you have an opportunity to rank for a wider variety of keyword terms than for an internal page.

Homepage optimisation can be done in many ways but here's an outline of some of the strategies that I have used with great success for our clients.

How to optimise your homepage for SEO

The first thing I do when looking at a homepage of a website is get an understanding of the overall theme of the site in terms of keywords. The easiest way to understand this is to take a holistic look at your website, the products or services you offer and write down a list of keywords associated with your products and services.

For example you may have a website about outdoor furniture settings and you sell a wide variety of different settings through your site. So the top level theme of your site would centre around the keyword term 'outdoor furniture'.

The first thing I would do is find out different variations of that keyword term and add it into the first introductory paragraph of the site. For this example I've gone to the Google Keyword tool and added the term 'outdoor furniture' and got these results back:-

• designer outdoor furniture
• garden outdoor furniture
• outdoor dining furniture
• outdoor furniture
• outdoor furniture chair
• outdoor furniture chairs
• outdoor furniture covers
• outdoor furniture sets
• outdoor furniture table
• outdoor furniture tables
• outdoor garden furniture
• outdoor lounge furniture

Please note: I've picked out the most relevant keywords for this example. Obviously you will want to be a little more specific with your choices depending on the products or services you offer.

I would incorporate some of these keywords along with some semantically-related terms from the Google Keyword Tool (these can be found under the row that says 'additional keywords to consider').

(For more info about using the Google Keyword tool see the video entitled Using the Google Keyword Tool.)

An example of semantically-related keyword terms would be:-

• garden furniture
• outdoor chairs
• outdoor patio
• outdoor table
• patio furniture

Once I have selected all my keywords for the intro paragraph I would then start to incorporate these into my content in a natural way.

So from here I can start to formulate how I might break down some of these terms to incorporate my sub-section of products. There's a couple of ways I could potentially break these down:-

• by item (eg. tables, chairs, covers etc)
• by make (eg. garden furniture, outdoor furniture, patio furniture etc)
• by what it's made with (eg. teak, cast iron, aluminium etc)

Once you have decided the best way to break up your products you can start writing additional paragraphs to help with homepage SEO.

Homepage Optimisation - Link to internal pages

Once you've created your sub-paragraph sections you will want to start linking through to your internal pages. Usually I will link through to product or service pages using keywords I've chosen from the Google Keyword Tool.

For example, if one of my products on offer is "Outdoor Tables", I will link to this page of my website from my homepage using the anchor text "Outdoor Furniture Table" as previously researched in the Google Keyword Tool.

For more info please read our article Anchor text - how to use it effectively.

Adding title attributes to your links for homepage optimisation

Another element you may want to consider adding to your links is a title attribute with either a call to action or a variation of your keywords.

Using this method has proven a great way to get a homepage ranked for multiple keyword terms.

Watch this video to find out how to add a title attribute to your links.

Using the techniques I've outlined above should help you create a homepage with SEO optimisation for your website.