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A major trend in web design is to have a very clean and simplistic home page with minimal text content. Instead the focus is on large typography, pictures, video content and large icons that lead the user to other sites and pages.

Although this style is visually very appealing, it’s important to remember that Google still heavily values text content on any web site’s home page. Therefore, a home page with no text content at all, which is solely graphics-based, could have an impact on your Google search rankings.

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There are several points that need to be considered when creating a very minimal website and most importantly it needs to be both user and search engine friendly:

1. You need to have at least a text title (it’s best to use a “H1” tag, ask your web team) followed by a short paragraph of text. You also need to make sure you include your main keywords in both.

No text at all would make it much harder and more expensive for an SEO company to get the search ranking results you want. This is because it’ll prove more difficult for Google to understand and value your site if it has so little content to work with.

2. If you decide on a minimal design for your website’s home page, it’s worth taking the time to make sure your inner pages, such as “about us” or “our services”, are much more text heavy in order to make up for the lack of text on the home page.

Google is increasingly giving much more value to these inner pages than ever before. We often see Google results with links to specific “inner pages” of websites rather than the main home page. So, in that respect, things are getting better for those who choose not to have a great deal of text content on their home page.

3. SEO and web rankings depend partly on other websites linking to yours. It’s often hard to get incoming links to inner pages as most directories do not accept this kind of “deep linking” (to pages other than your home page) and this is the same with many other websites, social media platforms, and organisations.

So in essence, you will generally get more links to your home page than you will get to other pages of your website (although this is not always true, it’s generally the case). Therefore, it’s always best to make sure the home page of your website has sufficient text content. This will help Google understand it better and in turn attribute more value and higher rankings to your website.

4/ Make sure all graphics on the home page and elsewhere have an “alt text” tag. This is a text description coded into the html and not visible on the website itself, but visible to search engines. All pictures used on your website must have this tag filled in to help Google understand your pictures, as well as users using screen readers.

5/ It’s also a good idea to considering having some kind of social media integration on your home page, so as well as a title and a small paragraph, why not add a Twitter feed or widget too? This wouldn’t look too cluttered, but would mean you’re considering your search rankings as well as designing a fresh, clean site.

Overall, it’s definitely possible to have a minimal website that isn’t very text heavy and this is something our team here at Codastar web design london can achieve. It’s important to talk about your requirements in order to make sure you’re still going to show up as high as possible in search rankings and to also ensure that people visiting your site aren’t confused by the lack of text and information that they see.

One Response to “Minimal website design and higher Google rankings”

  1. Ed

    Very important point about havig text on your homepage, especially after the recent Panda updates to Google’s alogrithm. Two of our clients were directly effected by Panda. Both had nice graphics but little text on their homepages and dropped significantly down the rankings after Panda. After researching Panda we realised this might be the case. So we added a couple of keyword rich paragraphs to the homepages and lo and behold they crept back up the SERPs again. Good article.

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