Author Topic: Home page link "best practices"  (Read 2320 times)

ergophobe

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Home page link "best practices"
« on: February 19, 2020, 12:32:36 AM »
Someone I know (not me) just got a report from an SEO agency who, citing "best practices," advised:
 - No text links on the home page
 - All links on the home page should be buttons
 - All buttons should have the anchor text: "Learn more."

I'd be curious to know what "best practices" document they are referencing.

Brad

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Re: Home page link "best practices"
« Reply #1 on: February 19, 2020, 01:16:44 AM »
This sounds like a web designer pretending to be a SEO.

Rupert

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Re: Home page link "best practices"
« Reply #2 on: February 19, 2020, 08:47:56 AM »
No results found for "All links on the home page should be buttons".
and
No results found for "No text links on the home page".

so no exact match from a wealth of best practice sites.

I think Brad is right.  They made it up to sound impressive. Can you share the source  ;)
... Make sure you live before you die.

ukgimp

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Re: Home page link "best practices"
« Reply #3 on: February 19, 2020, 10:39:29 AM »
Utter bollocks.

jetboy

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Re: Home page link "best practices"
« Reply #4 on: February 19, 2020, 11:05:41 AM »
Quote
This sounds like a web designer pretending to be a SEO.

Or a muppet pretending to be a web designer pretending to be a SEO.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2020, 05:53:34 PM by jetboy »

ergophobe

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Re: Home page link "best practices"
« Reply #5 on: February 19, 2020, 05:23:10 PM »
>>No results found

I meant my comment about being curious as to what document they were referencing to be tongue in cheek. I can't imagine any such document.

This sounds like a web designer pretending to be a SEO.

I looked up the agency after I posted. Nobody on the staff who is a dedicated SEO.

I can see the text vs button rec based on *design* considerations, but this was an SEO audit. I could also see it as a conversion optimization recommendation too, but in that case, my recommendation would be to *test* it, not to *do* it because of some putative best practice.

And then, from an SEO point of view, I can't imagine worse advice for the home page links than to say that the anchor text should 1) be the same on all links and 2) have no keywords that describe the target page.

I think of your home page body links as golden opportunities to impact the flow of authority through the site. Ideally, they would use keywords that would differentiate the targets and help SEs decide which pages are most important and what they are about as soon as they crawl your first page.

>>utter bullocks

Ya.
« Last Edit: February 19, 2020, 05:52:27 PM by ergophobe »