Dont over optimize your homepage - The story of Mr. Search Engine

A common trap that many webmasters fall upon is optimizing their homepage for too many keywords. They expect that all their search engine traffic should come to their homepage. Links are built to their homepage with all kinds of different keyword phrases.At Xenyo we believe in thinking logically and sometimes its good to think back to what search engines are trying to do.

But since its late and my head is not quite right, let me tell a story about Mr. Search Engine.

Mr. Search Engines is a librarian of a huge library with have millions of books(read websites) stored up.

He is approached by millions of people a day, each with their own interests asking him to recommend the 10 best pages of his books for them. Mr. Search Engine tries to be a very helpful librarian and always goes that extra step. If someone wants a page about king sized beds, Mr. Search Engine wants to show the top ten pages about king sized beds and not the index of a book about beds.

This is unless he thinks that he doesnt have very good pages about king sized beds and will show the index page of his most trusted bed resource. The thing to remember about Mr. Search Engine is that he will always try to find the best resource for king sized beds first.

See not too hard really.

What has got to do with me?.. I know that!!! ……. I hear.

Well it illustrates the point that if your page is about king sized beds, Mr. Search Engine will find it easier to recommend that page.

Mr. Search engine is clever but can get confused when you tell him that your homepage is about 40 different things. Unless he has known your homepage for a very long time and trusts it enough to be an authority about your niche, hes not going to be recommending it often or very highly.

What Mr. Search Engine likes is for other authors to recommend your page naturally. He believes that if it is a good page, other authors will recommend it and if it is a very good page, the rate of recommedations from other authors will be bigger. From experience, Mr. Search Engine knows that the other authors dont just recommend the index page of a book but alot go the extra length to recommend the actual page, it is an easy pattern to spot.

Worse still, if you repeated tell him that the page is about 60 different topics and also bribe other authors to suddenly start recommending your page, you stand a chance of making him angry. Mr. Search Engine loves his job and does not like authors trying to trick him to recommending the wrong page. Mr. Search Engine has a long memory for those that try to trick him.