SEO: Promote that Content

Many Drupal users don't use the default front page the way it was intended. The front page, affectionately referred to as "node" is designed to be a chronological "river of news" of your own compilation. Any time you create a page, you have the option to "promote" it to the front page. A portion of the content will appear on "node" (your home page) with a "read more" link.

Some folks hide "node" by choosing another page to serve as home page and make "node" a news page or don't use it all together - particularly on a small business website. I think this is a mistake.

The reason may be that they are not used to seeing this sort of home page, as though there is an assumption that it's only for news websites. Or sometimes people prefer the design control of a custom front page.

There are a few reasons I recommend that webmasters use "node" as it was intended, on your home page, but as you see in the title, I am going to talk about SEO right now. If you are not interested in getting traffic from search engines, then you can forget you saw this.

• Indexing - There is no better way to get Google to index your website in a hurry than to promote a bunch of interesting tidbits to the front page. The more content that you have linked directly from the front page - the better! Not only will your new content get picked up more quickly, but the home page itself will be more searchable, meaning more findable on the search engines.
• Links - Speaking of links, we know that the links to and from any page greatly influences the keyword relevance. Make sure that you use those keyword rich titles and anchor text. If you read my article on SEO, you read that having keywords headers and in link link anchor text is valuable. In this case you get a double whammy because the headers on the front page will be links - links to your keyword rich content!
• PR - Another benefit to the "river of news" home page is a better distribution of PR. I didn't expect this when converting my own website to Drupal, but the result was apparent and undeniable.

There are other advantages to using our friend "node" as intended, but that's another article.