886 – This doesn’t work anymore: Tom talks Long Home Pages

Episode 886 – Long Home Pages
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 886 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about long home pages and how you might not want to do that just because it's so cool. It might be hurting you, it's probably hurting you, and we'll get into that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss episode 885. That was 13 ways to use QR codes. You can get free QR code generators, and I have a bunch of episodes on QR codes, and they can really help you out. Uh, let's see, make sure you pick up a copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.

[00:01:04] All right, so let's talk about long homepages and why I'm pretty much against them. See, depending on your audience, you have to balance the cool factor of a website compared to the functionality of it. You know, the the internet and the search engines are not going to conform to you. You have to conform to them if you ever want free traffic. Now, I'm not any kind of big fan of SEO or search engine optimization. And why is that? And that's kind of crazy because I was one of the best of the best in the early days. I was taught by the best of the best, Michael Campbell, and he could get all ten, uh, slots for himself and his clients on the home page on keywords, and I could get anywhere from 4 to 6 on major keywords for my stuff. And so. But you know what? That was a long time ago.

[00:02:02] I'm not trying to reminisce here. All right? That was more than ten years ago, I think. Even more than that, when I quit fooling with search engine optimization to a high level. I mean, we used to be very, you know, meticulous about it on the percentage of keywords in the title tag and, you know, the keyword prominence and all these things that are just old school now. I mean, it's just not worth the trouble. Now, that does not mean I don't want you to do the simple things that keep you in good favor. And I have episodes on that, and this is one of them, pretty much. And that's with regard to these long home pages that put everything in your entire life scrolling down on one page. So you might think, this is cool. You might think, oh, well, this makes it easy on the visitor. Well, the problem is, is you have to balance this thing with you won't have any visitors if you don't can't be found. Okay, so now if you have other methods to drive traffic, like you're willing to just pay for ads, great. Then you could do whatever you want. Uh, if you have a big email list like I do. Yeah, you can get away with murder. You can. You don't have to to to play the search engine game. But still, to this day, even with my big email list, when I create something, I still create it so that it doesn't shoot myself in the foot with regard to search engines so I can get free traffic.

[00:03:36] All right. And and it's not going to happen overnight for you if you're, if you've been doing these bad things. But if you're just it won't cost you anything. You don't have to pay a fancy SEO person that's probably just pulling the wool over your eyes anyway, because nobody can guarantee high stuff, high rankings these days. And even if they could get you a high ranking two minutes later, Google could turn a dial and then you disappear off the face of the earth. So your money is much better spent on a lot of other things than SEO, however. I want your site to be substantial, and if one page is all you got, you don't even have a chance in hell because of free traffic. Because the search engines, one of their ranking things in their algorithm is, is your site substantial? And I don't know. And nobody really knows how much of the algorithm that is. But certainly you do not see, like we saw in the old days, uh, one page websites getting decent rankings, that never happens anymore. So you need to break up your stuff and you still have to make it easy to navigate. I have episodes on usability and readability. I think it's episode 312 and 313. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, the episode number. I think I'm pretty sure it was 312 and 313 for usability. So yeah, you still have to make it easy. And that's one of the reasons these supposed web cool web designers, it's easy on them.

[00:05:14] They don't have to create a navigation system very much if they just throw all your crap on one page. All right. So so they're kind of lazy about that or they don't know how to flow people through a website, which is probably the case because a lot of these web designers were out of work, graphic artists that just jumped on. And they can make your your websites look cool. But that doesn't mean they know all these things that are hurting your business. Okay, if you're going to have a website for business, you want it to help your business, not hurt. Okay. So. You got to create a navigation system, break your stuff up, make sure it's easy to navigate, but I'm just really against slopping everything on one page and making it so that the the search engines hate you. You know, there's you're just cutting out half of the or more than half of the world, right? If you can't be found. Uh, which is forcing you to pay for ads or, and I want you to build a big email list for sure. I've done, you know, lots of summits on that. And I wrote the ultimate guide to list building. And, you know, that's the key to big money, but I certainly don't turn down any free traffic from search engines. Okay. So so just by doing this simple thing of expanding your information into a more substantial website is going to help you. Now, if you expand it to two pages instead of one, I that ain't going to cut it.

[00:06:44] You have to really add content. One of the ways you can do it is with a blog because, uh, each even though you when you see a blog and you might see ten postings on one page, each one of those blog postings to the search engines is a is a separate page. So a blog is a good way to keep you expanding your site all the time. And that makes you look even better to search engines, because it looks like you're putting fresh content up and they love fresh content. Your site is getting bigger and more substantial. People are spending more time on it, which is one of the ranking factors, you know, so all of these things add up to, uh, it's probably better that you expand your site rather than slop everything on one page. And don't try this thing either. Slop it on one page and then take the same information and put it on separate pages. That's duplicate content. You don't want to do that because that'll make you look bad too. All right. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com and don't forget to grab a copy of that automation e-book, which allows me the time to do these 8, 900 episodes for you, because I don't fight with my computer all day. So that's it. screwthecommute.com/automatefree and I will catch you on the next episode. See you later.