Best location for articles on home page of website?

11 Jun 07 10:41 pm

Hey Geoff,

It really depends on what the purpose of the article is! Articles can perform a number of jobs -- they can be kind-of sales pitches, they can be optimized for long tail search terms, they can help boost the relevancy of your site through siloing, and they can also (who would have figured?) provide good content for users browsing your site. If you're lucky they can do all of these things at the same time.

Where you put them on your site depends on where they fit into the picture. For instance, some people don't list their articles on the front page of their SEO site, but have a small link to an articles page which lists them all. They use the articles for long-tail search terms and deep-linking, but rely on the content of the front page to provide affiliate sales.

For other people, the idea is that the longer you can keep someone on your site, the more opportunity you have to sell to them, so the articles are featured more prominently (particularly if there's a short sell at the bottom of each article!).

From a search engine perspective, so long as your articles are siloed (which really means "linked to related articles") and there's a way for the search engine spider to get to them, you should be fine. Doesn't hurt to get a few deep links to your articles either.

Now discovering that I haven't actually answered your question... The easy answer is "place them in a column until the list of them gets too unwieldly to comfortably list in a column. Once this happens break them down into sub-categories." You want to walk the line between having it look like you've got a lot of content on your site (so people dont' just bounce out of there) but not having it look so confusing and intimidating that people don't know where to start.

Hehe, it's a bad thing when I start waffling.

All the best,
Mark