Does anyone know how the SEs (Google in particular) view the Home page in relation to other pages

They'll view it as blank!

..and if they view it as a blank, how important is that? It won't be completely blank of course as I'll have a title and some alt tags, plus a small amount of text. Example www.eendar.com. Interestingly they only have 3 pages cached by Google, but still have PR5.

If the homepage is blank, then there are no links to internal pages for the search engines to follow.

The bottom line is...if you don't care of the homepage ranks for anything, then you don't HAVE to have content on it, but you absolutely want to have links to your internal pages on it (and preferably text links!).

I will of course have internal links - sorry if I haven't explained myself well. I just want to get some ideas of the SEO importance of having a home page which is more 'design' than text

Your home page should at the very least have:

1) Who you are
2) Where you are
3) What you do

Without that your site has no identity, also Google won't be able to assign a relevant description to that page.

Think of search results page... what do you want it displaying under the link to your site?

Internal links? Or some relevant text to entice a visit?

[edited by: Demaestro at 9:20 pm (utc) on Dec. 14, 2007]

Well, that is assuming he wants his homepage to rank for something.

There are some sites whose homepage is not designed to rank.

Sites that target too many different topics and instead use their homepage as a doorway to the internal pages that are designed to rank.

I like text on the homepage of my sites, but there are valid times when the homepage is simply going to rank so a webmaster me prefer a nice design instead. Heck...Brett mentioned this in his ooooold "Themes" post also.

Thanks for your advice guys. I maybe shouldn't have mentioned the word 'Splash page' as these are mostly (always?) in Flash. What I was trying to find out was the importance of the home page in relation to the rest of the site, and whether I could get away with a minimal amount of text on the home page. I.e. internal links and maybe a strapline, with the rest of the page being a graphic - but not Flash.

SEO aside, sites I have been involved with in the past where the homepage is designed more graphically have tended to have a much higher bounce rate than those that deliver relevant information. Additionally, they have proved much harder to rank, specifically for "generic" terms.

[edited by: Simsi at 2:13 pm (utc) on Dec. 27, 2007]

i have sites where the home page is purely internal links, i haven't had a problem.

internal links are still text and therefore content, i don't really get the point of the question.

and oh yes, what do you think the homepage of WebmasterWorld is?

The point to the question is that I'd like to move away from the 'classic' home page design I have been using, i.e. logo + strapline at top, top links about the company, sidebar links about the product, and body text saying something about the company + maybe somekey messages, to a more innovative SME design which will differentiate the site from the other classically designed sites out there. I'm confident that this would work from a concept point of view, but I am nervous about taking this step if the result is that I don't get good rankings - obviously there's no point having a website if it doesn't get found (and yes, I am aware there are other ways to market, but all of them cost).

I therefore wanted to find out what experience other designers had had. Hope this is clear.

Interesting....

It is my opinion that you should have at least some content on there.

Is there any point trying to re-invent the wheel, if it makes the life of Search Engines more difficult?

I suppose it boils down to the purpose of the website, but you also want to make sure it doesnt look like you are trying to fudge the keyword density by only having a few words on the main landing page.

The www.eendar.com example is a very good one however.

Their Keyword cloud is one word... "eendar"

Amazing really - no content and their <title>is .........eendar.......

They have 99 inbound links, that seem to be consisting of blogs blogs and more blogs, yet their Page Rank is 5!

It would be interesting to see for what terms they rank highly on the SERPs - as a crawler would have a nightmare on that site it seems.

But if it works - what are we to know? :)

The point to the question is that I'd like to move away from the 'classic' home page design I have been using .... to a more innovative SME design which will differentiate the site from the other classically designed sites out there.

There is a reason things are in these positions. Users don't care about "innovative design," they care more about predictability and expected behavior and are unsettled by anything less. Dig around webpagesthatsuck.com for good reasons to stick with classic layout.