Infinite Path

Everyone knows that content is king when it comes to search engine optimisation, but it’s a point so vital that even Google feels it’s worth repeating.

In the latest Google Webmaster Central video Matt Cutts, head of the firm’s Webspam team, explained that homepage content is absolutely crucial if people want to rank highly.

However, he did admit that bigger isn’t always better and sites which were overloaded with homepage content can become cumbersome and slow to load, something that will anger users.

Clearly then, there’s a balance to be struck especially with current design trends leading to an increasing number of sites embracing multimedia content and featuring it prominently on their sites.

According to Cutts, in these sorts of situations high-quality SEO is even more vital as less text means less space to do a good job.

“If you have more content on a home page, there’s more text for Googlebot to find, so rather than just pictures, for example, if you have pictures plus captions – a little bit of textual information can really go a long way,” he said.

So there you have it, search engine optimisation is vital and can still be achieved even if you don’t have large volumes of text on your home page. (For the record, Cutts’ blog is a little more old school and features around five entries on its homepage and he seems to do just fine when it comes to ranking for SEO-related terms, which is exactly what you’d expect.)

Content remains king, and with a good-quality, well-optimised home page you can expect to increase your search engine visibility significantly.