Once upon a time, websites had homepages. Homepages nearly always existed at the top of the domain structure. They resided at an URL that looked something like this: www.OurCompanysName.com. Homepages were considered the entry points of websites, functioning pretty much the same way as the lobby of a building does. Visitors are expected to walk through the front door, look at the directory, and perhaps even sign in. Only then could they proceed to their intended destination, be it the correct floor, apartment, or even a single room in the complex.
Search has changed all that. Thanks to search results for specific keyword queries, visitors now stream into websites via side doors and back doors. They magically teleport to the basement or the roof without so much as passing Go (or passing through that once all-important lobby). They’re practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.
Effective search engine optimization is changing the website paradigm even more. Certainly, websites continue to have homepages, but homepages hardly function as the gateways they were before search became the primary method through which users navigate the Internet.
Say, for example, you’re searching for an Apple iPod. The first organic result the search engines display isn’t www.Apple.com. Instead, it’s deeper in the site: www.Apple.com/iTunes.
What’s the lesson here? Any and every page on a website that appears in search engine results is a potential landing page for searchers. By extension, this means that each landing page is the potential gateway for that entire website. Poof! Every single page on a website that search engines know about is now a homepage.
For the searcher, this is extremely convenient. It helps them to quickly find and directly navigate to the relevant results they seek. There’s often no need to scan a site’s navigation, to burrow down through categories and subcategories of content, or to use the site’s own internal search mechanism.
For site owners and operators, there are other implications to this. When every page is a homepage, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you’d potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications as well. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around.
If there’s a perception that they’ve landed on the wrong page of a site that looks promising, it must be immediately apparent what to do next. Is there clear site navigation on each page? An internal search box? Information indicating what site section they landed on? Does the page clearly indicate the name of the site and contain other information that anchors it back to a brand and/or a domain? If they landed on a product page but the product isn’t exactly right, is there a “more like this” button, or a listing of comparable products?
Just as searchers are looking for relevant results, website owners who hope to be found in search engine results have goals: a sale, a sign-up, a subscription, or some other type of conversion activity. If the site’s goal is to get visitors to sign up for a free newsletter subscription, for example, make sure that call-to-action exists on every page of the website.
Gone are the days when a website’s homepage could be counted on to do the heavy lifting. Now, all search-findable pages must be counted upon to do the lifting all by themselves. When searchers search, they find the page that matches their query. Search the title or author of a specific book, for example, and you’re going to get results for the page that sells that book or that author on Amazon.com or BN.com. Click on one of those results, and you’ll land directly on the relevant page.
For this reason, page titles, descriptions, and tags, as well as the actual copy and other content that appears on a given page, must match up with the searcher’s expectations when he or she clicks on a search result. Even the navigational hierarchy matters to some extent. A searcher can make sense of that earlier example: www.apple.com/iTunes. There’s an implicit iPod in that URL structure, even if it doesn’t explicitly say so. The page is titled “Apple - iPod + iTunes”. The page description, visible in search results, begins, “Learn about iPod”. Product photos are front-and-center, as is Apple’s branding. You know you’re in the right place. You know it’s Apple’s place. In a sense, it could be considered a homepage, not for the product’s manufacturer, but for the product itself. It displays all flavors of iPod: the Touch, the Shuffle, the Classic, and the Nano (each of which has its own landing [or home] page, of course).
The lesson here? Search engines enable searchers to cut to the chase. This fact should direct your site’s development, structure, copy, and keyword strategy. Don’t count on wooing them with lengthy introductions or an exchange of pleasantries. Instead, be ready for them when they get to your site.