More importantly,  SEO is greatly done to improve your site rankings on search engines.

What does this mean? 

It means that if you have your site or blog properly set up for search engines, it is likely to rank on the first page on search engines.

 Again, if whatever your website or blog post is about is relevant to the engines, anyone who searched for a term related to your blog niche is likely to click on your link.

 This here is a recipe for massive blog traffic when it is done right.

Why  you should be structuring your homepage for SEO

Your homepage SEO plays an important role in indexing your site on search engines.

Search engine bots will visit your homepage first because it knows it will find all the pages for your site there which in turn can lead it to all the links that it can crawl. 

Having a properly structured homepage makes it easy for the bots to crawl your site.

Types of SEO

SEO has mainly three types which all play critical roles in helping to project your site more to search engines. 

There is:

• On-page SEO 
• Off-page SEO.
• Technical SEO 

Your homepage SEO structuring falls under the on-page SEO 

How do you SEO Your homepage?

Here is a comprehensive guide on how to SEO your homepage properly for your blog to help optimize it for search engines and potentially increase your organic traffic.

URL structure 

Your URL structure should be properly set up. This will help your site to be easily detected by search engines.

Instead of having your URL structure looking like www. yousite. com/20/02/03/home; you can have it look like www .yoursite. com/home.

You can do these settings in WordPress by going to your backend and in your dashboard area you select 

settings>permalinks>postname

 Google insists that the date in your URL structure does not harm your website in any way.

 But seriously, unless your site is a news site, do not select the date URL structure as it tells the bot that your site content is not evergreen therefore your site should not be selected to rank.

Theme

The next thing you should look out for when structuring your site for on-page SEO as a beginner is your blog theme. The structure of your theme helps your site puts your on-page SEO ‘A’ game on top. 

The theme you use should be  well structured and coded.

 Hold on don’t get scared with the coding bit.

 Unless you are good with coding and you will want to touch your theme’s structure then it’s fine.

But if you are a tech dummy like me I suggest you leave the theme be as it is.

The theme you will be choosing for your site should be light in weight. That is, it shouldn’t be heavily coded with lots of plugins all in one theme. 

Again, your theme should be responsive. A responsive theme is one that is able to adapt to all screen sizes.

There is a screen size for desktop, mobile, and tablets. You will have to consider these things when selecting a theme.

Two good free lightweight and responsive themes I will recommend for sites are Astra and Generate Press.

These two themes are well coded and light in weight. They are well structured for SEO which takes a lot of SEO work off your plate. 

I personally switched my theme from Themify to Astra and I must say my site load speed has drastically improved.

Keywords Researching 

By now you should have an idea of what your site is about. You will have to do some keywords research that relates to your blog site which you can include in your headings and texts for your homepage. 

For instance, if your blog is about making money from home tips and tricks, you will have to search for the number of people who search for that term and how difficult it will be for you to rank on search engines.

Again, you should choose keywords that you will want to rank for and include in the text and heading contents on your homepage. 

 In my post on how to use Ubersuggest Keyword research tool, I go over the techniques on using Ubersuggest to search for keywords. 

 SEO setup for your Homepage Headings

Your homepage is the existence of your site. If your homepage has all the structures for SEO put in place, your site will be well on its way to being favored by the ‘gods of search engines’.

Your homepage should have a heading structure and the use of keywords on your page. The heading structures should be used in the following way:

•  H1- FOR VERY IMPORTANT TITLEs      
  • (Post title, page title)

•  H2 – FOR IMPORTANT TITLES
  • (Sub-headings)

•  H3-  RELATED TO YOUR H2 TITLES

•  H4- Subheading for H3

Your Heading 1 is the most important heading as it tells search engine bots what your post is about right from the onset. 

The homepage title should always be written in heading 1. It must also contain your primary or focus keyword that is, the topic you intend to rank for on search engines. 

Below is a screen shot of my homepage heading written in H1

Pro tip: Use only one H1 tag in every page.

The H2 title tag can be used 2 to three times per page.

 H3 to H6 can be used as often as you want to use it on your homepage 

Pro tip: Use keywords related to your primary keyword whenever you write a subheading title.

Using this form of headings to structure your homepage makes the google bot do a giddy dance for your site because it understands what your site is about easily as per the structuring of your heading tags.

 That is, it is able to understand the keywords that are very important to your blog per your heading structure.

Homepage Navigation menu

Your homepage should have an easy navigation menu. Your navigation will include your post pages and categories. 

The most important pages you should have in your menu is the page you mostly write on.

 So if your niche is writing on self-care, you should have a self-care tips section which under it has categories related to self-care.

Again your menu bar should have the following  pages

• About
• Contact page
• Privacy policy

These should be visible enough for visitors to view. 

I have my contact page and privacy under my About page just to make my menu area clean.

On the whole, the main idea of a menu bar is to make your site navigation easier for your readers. Kreezalid has a diagram showing the anatomy of an effective navigation menu

Homepage Content SEO

Your homepage must include contents such as images and texts that will help search engines to value your page as well as pique the interest of your site visitors.

Having a variety of your contents on your homepage can greatly increase the number of sessions you have per visitors as well as decrease the number of people who bounce off of your homepage 

Here are some text and image optimization content on your homepage you should consider doing.

• CONTENT IMAGE OPTIMIZATION 

As part of your homepage SEO strategy, image optimization also helps a great deal in improving your site structure for SEO.

The images should not be more than 200kb as anything other that can potentially slow down your site painfully. The images on my homepage are less than 100kb which in effect has increased my page load speed effectively.

If your images are large, consider compressing them with an image compressor plugin. I use short pixel to compress all my images.

Another thing you should take note of when optimizing your images for SEO is the Alt text.

All images on your homepage should have clearly defined Alt text with your keyword naturally thrown in it.

Alt-text is done to help blind people understand what images on the internet are about.

Therefore you will want to describe your image accurately for Google and blind people to read the image.

• TEXT CONTENT

how many words should a homepage be for sEO?

The text contents on your site should not be less than 600+ words. This is because a homepage with less than 600 words is viewed by the search engines as a less quality site.

For you to have a lot of text content on your homepage that has variations of the keywords you target for your site, you can have some of your posts featured on your homepage.

For me, I have my homepage set to static therefore I have included posts that I want to be seen and thus make it easier for visitors to navigate through my blog posts.

Improve the site speed of your homepage  

To please the ‘gods of search engines’, it is important to have your site speed to be less as possible. As at the time I was writing this post, my site speed load was at 2.3s on Gtmetrix and Pingdom.

 Research has shown that internet users are likely to bounce off your page if it takes more than 3s for your page to load. Therefore, it will be wise for you to improve your site speed if it has a slow load speed.

Best websites  for checking your homepage site speed

There are several website tools for checking your site speed. These site speed checking sites will also provide you with recommendations on how you can improve your web load speed.

If the information is too overwhelming for you to do, you can alternatively sort the help of a web developer to help optimize your page load speed.

The best website speed checking tool I use and will recommend is Gtmetrix and Pingdom. They are absolutely free to use at any time.

These sites not only check your website speed, but it also gives you the exact places and images on your site that you will need to work on to improve your site speed.

Homepage title optimization

Your homepage title should be optimized to include your keywords.

For instance, I have my homepage title as African fashion- African print dresses and Nigerian styles. The words in my site title greatly optimize my site for SEO as it is what I want my site to be optimized for.

2 POINTS TO CONSIDER WHEN WRITING A TITLE FOR YOUR SITE 

• Your title should include your main keywords
• The title should not be more than 60 characters

Meta Description SEO for your pages

Every page you set up should have a meta description. This is a summary of what your page is about. Your meta description for your homepage should contain a summary of what your page is about.

Again your meta description should have your major keyword used naturally in your description.

Although meta description is not that important in the world of SEO it sure helps visitors to understand what your site is about when your site pulls in web engines

All meta descriptions should be 160 characters. Most SEO plugins like Yoast and Rankmath (which btw I love and use) provide a place for you where you can input your meta description.

It will also guide you to stay within the minimum amount of characters you should use in your description. 

Conclusion….

Structuring your homepage for SEO is one of the things that is mostly overlooked by website owners. It is important that you optimize your homepage for SEO to improve your site visibility and appearance to search engines.

I hope this article on how to SEO your homepage has been helpful to you and has also made you realized the importance of homepage structuring for SEO

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You can share with me your thoughts in the comments section 

Author’s Note:

I have made it my life mission to document everything I encounter in my blogging journey that has been useful. I have a post on how to create a fashion blog for cheap as I did mine. Along the way I made some mistakes and I learnt from it. You can take a look at the 7 mistakes you should avoid before starting a blog. 

Again, here is another post on  how to use Ubersuggest Keywords research tool for your keyword hunt