At 9:00am this morning I had a scheduled telephone conversation to review a website. I noticed that there was hardly any text on the first page. “How many words should you have on your homepage?” I asked.
The business person that I was talking to said that she wasn’t sure. “Is there a specific number?” she said.
“About 300 words for your website homepage would be helpful,” I said. “This is a good target for blog entries and the same number works for homepages. You can of course write much longer blogs (or homepages), i.e. in excess of 1,000 words.”
“By having a few hundred words on your homepage, you are serving up more material for the search engine spiders to read. Include a few anchor text links*, just like I have done within my homepage: www.nigeltemple.com
There are some exceptions, i.e. if the design precludes using much text. In this case, I imagine that other strategies are being used to find customers (i.e. advertising).
* Anchor text links are text links which jump to a destination page or blog entry within your own website. If you use Wikipedia – you will see a lot of anchor text links.
PS I offer copywriting training as well as website writing services.
