having large amount of text on homepage for seo

[roc1]

Is this still something that is good for seo etc? I went on a Kevin Mullins seo day a few years ago and his advice was to have at least 1000 words on the homepage, I have currently about 500 but it doesn't look great so looking to change things around a bit.

Only ask as am seeing a lot of mid to high end togs such as Ross Harvey etc with little text on their homepages, so wanted to see what the current consensus is on this and getting the balance right with text and images whilst keeping it looking good!?

Cheers

 

[neil_g]

Maybe it's good for seo but rubbish for actual site content. Who on earth would actually read 1000 words on a website homepage.

 

[Phil V]

Don't count words, it'd less important than lots of other things.

 

[SimonF01]

Hide them where they don't distract from the photography maybe ? but I cannot see anyone wanting to read 1000 words when they are looking for pictures.

 

[nass]

Good luck getting a site anywhere in Google without words.

 

[Phil V]

Good luck getting a site anywhere in Google without words.

It can be done and there are a few people here with text free homepages who have done it.
However, common sense says it's easier with text than without.

 

[nass]

"Can" - yes, but man "can" also go to the moon! Do you have any examples of sites that rank for something that's actually competitive, that's done by an amateur and that isn't being propped up by dodgy backlinks?

@SimonF01 - I really wouldn't try and hide 1000 words on a page

 

[SimonF01]

@SimonF01 - I really wouldn't try and hide 1000 words on a page [/quote]

Hey can't a man have a hobby ?

 

[nass]

It's very very very very very easy to do. Mr Google might not be hugely impressed at "wedding photography {placename}" x 333 though

To be fair everything's in a bit of flux at the moment, Google is throwing its weight about a lot with recent updates. Royal PITA. It's a real problem for portfolio type sites though, there's only so much you can stuff into alt tages, title etc without it starting to get silly . And I'm finding that long content seems to be back in favour this quarter, especially meaty long credible unique content together with Google authorship.

Do I have the answer? no. But textless makes the job a billion times harder =(

 

[Phil V]

"Can" - yes, but man "can" also go to the moon! Do you have any examples of sites that rank for something that's actually competitive, that's done by an amateur and that isn't being propped up by dodgy backlinks?

@SimonF01 - I really wouldn't try and hide 1000 words on a page

There's Ben

I'm certain there are others too but I can't be bothered trawling all the posts in Business looking for them.

I never said it was easy, but it's certainly do-able, and given that we're a visual industry, surely a great looking website makes more sense than a crap one that ranks easier.

 

[Zharrt]

All depends where is classed as on your home page? Do they mean body text or can you bury it in keywords etc

 

[theurbanclown]

"Can" - yes, but man "can" also go to the moon! Do you have any examples of sites that rank for something that's actually competitive, that's done by an amateur and that isn't being propped up by dodgy backlinks?

@SimonF01 - I really wouldn't try and hide 1000 words on a page

As Phil has pointed out, I don't have any text on my front page apart from copyright in the footer. I'm sitting on page 1 for 'wedding photographer <my city>' without many backlinks at all, let alone dodgy ones. If I'm honest I haven't put much effort into SEO apart from satisfying some criteria suggested by the Yoast plugin.

A lot of couples always comment on how clean and simple looking my site is, and not cluttered for info. Again, as Phil said, it's an industry about visuals and personally I wouldn't sacrifice that for a higher ranking - especially when that's a decision nobody should have to make.

 

[ecoleman]

Text doesn't have to be on the home page. Put the text somewhere else.
Why does everybody think that google only reads your home page?

 

[nass]

As Phil has pointed out, I don't have any text on my front page apart from copyright in the footer. I'm sitting on page 1 for 'wedding photographer <my city>' without many backlinks at all, let alone dodgy ones. If I'm honest I haven't put much effort into SEO apart from satisfying some criteria suggested by the Yoast plugin.

A lot of couples always comment on how clean and simple looking my site is, and not cluttered for info. Again, as Phil said, it's an industry about visuals and personally I wouldn't sacrifice that for a higher ranking - especially when that's a decision nobody should have to make.

Hello Ben - just fyi I actually have you at #18 for this - as you know it depends on which computer you search from and where you're searching, whether you're logged in etc etc. I can only see 3 organics above the fold, rest are G places or G adwords.

I obviously wouldn't advocate a whole thesis of text on your homepage unless your site is informational, but sure as eggs is eggs, it's text that matters most to Google. Sure it can infer from title, alt etc, but text matters

 

[theurbanclown]

Hello Ben - just fyi I actually have you at #18 for this - as you know it depends on which computer you search from and where you're searching, whether you're logged in etc etc. I can only see 3 organics above the fold, rest are G places or G adwords.

I obviously wouldn't advocate a whole thesis of text on your homepage unless your site is informational, but sure as eggs is eggs, it's text that matters most to Google. Sure it can infer from title, alt etc, but text matters

I was page 1, spot 1 for quite a while - the recent dip is more to do with a lack of blogging. Text is not the be all and end all - what matters to Google isn't what matters to couples.

 

[nass]

Text is not the be all and end all - what matters to Google isn't what matters to couples.

Yes, that's a very good comment. I do websites for business professionally and quite often I have to rein back what people want to write about because I want to make sure that people actually have a reason to pick up the phone and speak to them. Conversion tends to be much higher when you've had talktime.

And with Google, people sometimes get too excited and obsessed with google rankings at the cost of everything else. Google might be a way to get people to your door but if they don't convert what's the point? And nowadays there are so many other ways to get people to your door. As a specialist you obviously know what your clients like so that's a judgement for you to make.

For local searches like the one you need to rank for using a 3 word search, you probably don't need to do all that much to rank, realistically, only 1.3 mill results or so, and the competition probably doesn't have a billion backlinks that you need to outdo either. My comments were more about a different arena, a 1 word search with 60m results - I think it'd be tricky to get anywhere on something like that without wordage. That's my battle - would be delighted to be wrong though

 

[nass]

Y'know, I wonder if schema and microdata might not help with image-only pages... Fwiw, I just found a 3 word search, 2.25m results, for which google awards my site the first 15 results. I've done a lot of microdata markup on my site, and recently added breadcrumbs microdata as well. But 15, I've NEVER see that before.

 

[theurbanclown]

Yes, that's a very good comment. I do websites for business professionally and quite often I have to rein back what people want to write about because I want to make sure that people actually have a reason to pick up the phone and speak to them. Conversion tends to be much higher when you've had talktime.

And with Google, people sometimes get too excited and obsessed with google rankings at the cost of everything else. Google might be a way to get people to your door but if they don't convert what's the point? And nowadays there are so many other ways to get people to your door. As a specialist you obviously know what your clients like so that's a judgement for you to make.

For local searches like the one you need to rank for using a 3 word search, you probably don't need to do all that much to rank, realistically, only 1.3 mill results or so, and the competition probably doesn't have a billion backlinks that you need to outdo either. My comments were more about a different arena, a 1 word search with 60m results - I think it'd be tricky to get anywhere on something like that without wordage. That's my battle - would be delighted to be wrong though

Indeed. Lots of ways to win work, and giving enough info but not too much is as much a skill as anything else.

I think a lot of us knew the OP was aiming at weddings, which isn't mentioned in their post - but yes, obviously much harder for more generic and broader search terms.