Your home page is the first page that the search engines will crawl
and rank. To ensure you have the best chance of being found (and then
well ranked) by the search engines, you need to make sure that it is
set up correctly.
ePages V5 has a number of features that help you get your home page
right. It helps if you know how each area works. So here are some
steps to follow. We will be using the eCorner Marketplace -
www.ecornerstores.com.au as our example site. It is a standard ePages
V5.04 store and merchant back office (MBO).

The "Title" of the homepage

The 'Title' of your home page is very important so you will need to
give it careful consideration. It will be a key aspect of how search
engines find you. As a general rule, you will be ranked (where you
appear in search results) by most search engines based on the title,
content and relevance They also use the number of websites that you
link to (and link to you) plus how many visitors search for terms
relevant to your website.
Google is the most heavily used search engine, responsible for around
65% - 70% of all search-related traffic to web sites.

How does ePages create the title on the homepage?

In ePages 5.04, ePages combines the 'Shop Name' field and the 'Slogan'
field that can be found in the Settings Manager in your MBO. In 5.03
the Slogan field is found in Design Manager/Settings Tab and the Shop
Name can be found in Settings Manager/General Tab.

The title is important because it is a key descriptor for your store.
It appears in the header bar of the browser window. It is also the
first line which appears in most search engine results and especially
in Google.

What makes a good title?

If your brand name or company name is very well known then you may
want to have the Brand or Company name in the title. But in general
(for new websites and stores) the Title should be used to describe
your store. If you look at the eCorner Stores Marketplace title you
will see that the Shop Name is eCorner Stores and the Slogan is a
number of keywords separated by a vertical bar "|" (found over the "\"
character on your keyboard). The Title has a finite length and should
ideally be only 64 characters long (this includes spaces and special
characters). This fits into the browser header bar and search engine
results nicely. It can be up to 80 or more for the browser header bar
but anything more than 64 will be truncated by Google in search
results.

Home Page Meta Name ="Description"

Search Engines will take the information that you enter in the base
category 'Description' as the description of your products and
services in the search results.  Again this is very important as
search engines will look for and use the Meta Tags that you provide in
the Header area of the webpage. If you are using ePages 5.04, simply
click on categories and complete the description field. If you are
using ePages 5.03, click on 'Categories' from the top menu bar and
then 'General' from the main content menu.

If you are concerned that what you are adding as description here will
clutter up you website don't worry too much. This is the base category
and you get there only 2 ways from the website:

1.      If you included a link to the base category and;
2.      If you click on the breadcrumb trail.

Home Page Meta Name="Keywords" content

In a similar to what we've described above, ePages V5 will create Meta
Name - Keywords for your home page from the Keywords field in the
General Tab of the base category
.
Important Note: In general it is very important to add descriptions
and keywords to every category, content page, article and product
page. You will find a description and keyword field in the MBO for
most pages that can be accessible via your website. Add the keywords
that are specific and relevant to that page. More is better, but don't
get carried away. If the keywords are not relevant to the content, the
page will not be well ranked. You don't have to repeat the same
keyword on the same page over and over again. The content should be
meaningful and relevant to what your website is presenting.

Review the HTML source of your Home Page

You can find all this information in the HTML source code of your
website. You can view to the source code from your browser by
selecting the Page drop down menu and then clicking on 'View Source'.
An alternative is to 'right-click in the main content area and then
chose 'View Source' from the menu.

What makes a good description and key words?

The main thing to remember is RELEVANCE. By this we mean that the
search engines will rank your website based on the likelihood that it
will satisfy the searchers requirements. So it is more than just about
the words. In the early days of the Internet, site builders used
hidden words, very small font, and commonly used search words to get
visitors and improve the site ranking. The search 'crawlers' are a lot
smarter now and use alternative criteria (based on relevance) to find
and rank your site.

Use of headings and image titles