Every Page is Your Homepage

Seth Godin chimes in with his take on how the homepage is no longer the spot you should focus so much attention. Rather, like I’ve mentioned before, every page of your site should be thought of as its own homepage. As more people adopt RSS as their main source of information, the point of entry into Web sites will quickly shift from the homepage to the exact page they’re reading in their feed reader. Google and the other search engines also don’t care about your homepage, they send people straight to the content that they’ve searched for.

It’s no longer an organic web filled with organisms or even a molecular one. It’s atomic. Each page on its own, each RSS drip, its own entity.

I believe because of this very reason that we are likely to see more focused attention on turning footers from the mundane “let’s drop that extra stuff we don’t know what to do with” location to a more robust and useful collection of links and information.  I expect site owners that go the route of treating all pages as potential homepages will see unexpected, but welcome SEO results. Just for the mere fact that by treating each page as more than a bucket to dump content into and forget about while spending time stressing out over which department gets top billing on the company homepage, they will in the process introduce good SEO practices possibly by accident.

Don’t ignore your homepage entirely, it’s still an important part of your identity. Just don’t forget you have many more doors that people are coming to you through as well.