Build Your Home Page
Great start! Now that you've chosen your site's Look & Feel, you're ready to start building your Theme-Based Content Site.
Don't worry if you'd like to improve your L&F before you continue. You can tweak it after you build your home page. At that point, you will have access to Site Central and the "Look and Feel Selector" button in the "All Pages" section. A click on that button brings you back to your L&F template.
A Home Page's Goals
The home page focuses on your Site Concept keyword, a keyword that best states the overall theme of your site, framed in terms of your Valuable PREselling Proposition (VPP).
- Start with the first entry box, Page Title, and continue until you finish entering the Body Copy.
- Click on the Preview It! button to check your content and its presentation.
- If the page is satisfactory, use Analyze It! to optimize the page properly for the Search Engines. (Site Concept keyword = home page's Specific Keyword.)
- Click on the Build It! button to save your work and make your home page go live!
It has two important audiences... humans and Search Engine spiders.
For humans, your home page must accomplish the following...
1) Deliver the "what's in it for me?" benefits.
2) Elaborate upon your "VPP" (what specific, high-value information your site delivers and its unique positioning/approach).
Visitors want to know if it's worth their time to investigate your full site. They want to know what sets you apart from your competition.
For Search Engines, the home page must deliver your site's content to their spiders cleanly and efficiently.
Use your Site Concept keyword slightly more than your high school English teacher taught was "good English." Blend in General keywords from your Master Keyword List and also use synonyms and variations, where applicable. This approach will help you achieve the correct "keyword density."
Make it a point to use your Site Concept keyword more heavily in the opening paragraph or two (it must be in your opening sentence), and also in the closing paragraph. And then, like a good chef, sprinkle it throughout! Your "scatter pattern" should look like an hourglass... bigger (i.e., more frequent) on the top and bottom, and less (but still present) in the middle of the page. This sets up the correct "keyword prominence" for your page.
Keyword prominence and keyword density are part of the on-page criteria that Search Engines use to rank pages. Analyze It! helps you meet those criteria!
So... what are the bottom line goals of your home page?
1) For your human readers, make your copy sufficiently compelling to get the click to your TIER 2 Keyword-Focused Content Pages, and the rest of your site.
2) For your spider readers, work your Site Concept keyword throughout your page so that the Search Engines rank it highly in their search results. And after you create some TIER 2 pages, the links from the home page to them will help spiders click through your site. These "bread crumbs" will help them put your TIER 2 and 3 pages into their databases.
This means that your potential visitors can find you for more and more Specific Keywords, which brings you ever more traffic!
Tips
Video
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Watch the Home Page Builder Video to reinforce your understanding. |
Do you want to download the video? Go to the DAY 6 section of the Action Guide for downloading instructions.
- Click on the question marks to access instructions and helpful strategies. Wring the most out of each entry box!
- It's best to work with a plain text editor as outlined in this TNT article. Here's a text editor template made especially for the Home Page.
- The Site Concept keyword is the "Specific Keyword" of the home page. That's why Analyze It! will use the term, Specific Keyword, in its home page report.
- Double-check that your Page Information (i.e., Page Title, Keywords, Description) is both correct and optimized through Analyze It!.
- For symbols a little out of the ordinary, try these Special HTML Characters.
- Adding an image to your home page is easy. See this TNT article for instructions.
- You can edit your home page whenever you want. In Site Central, click on the "Edit SiteBuilder Home Page" (in the "One Page at a Time" section of SiteBuilder).
- For additional help from other SBIers, see the SiteBuilder Libraries & Tools Forum.
Once you click "Build It!," SBI! publishes the home page to the Web and then builds a Search Engine-standard sitemap file. You will then ping the engines one time with the URL of that sitemap file to tell the engines about your site. After that, SBI! pings them automatically.
Once you've built the home page, you will have full access to Site Central. Your next task will be to set up your site's navigation. Click on the "Navigation Options" button in the "All Pages Section" of Site Central when you're ready.