I've heard some SEO people recommend that all important pages of the site are linked directly from the homepage. I've seen that on some sites this can cause a big unbalance on the homepage causing a large area of white space and the need for visitors to scroll through lists of things that are not of interest.
I've just visited http://www.wiggle.co.uk and discovered they've addressed the white space problem by adding more products to the homepage. There's a lot of scrolling to do still but not so much of a problem. Is it a valuable thing to link all important pages from the homepage?
well navigation is really important... its important that all important pages in your are linked to your homepage to make your site not just user friendly but also bot friendly..
I've heard some SEO people recommend that all important pages of the site are linked directly from the homepage. I've seen that on some sites this can cause a big unbalance on the homepage causing a large area of white space and the need for visitors to scroll through lists of things that are not of interest.
I've just visited http://www.wiggle.co.uk and discovered they've addressed the white space problem by adding more products to the homepage. There's a lot of scrolling to do still but not so much of a problem. Is it a valuable thing to link all important pages from the homepage?
The white space that you are talking about can be easily remedied and since we all know that products in the form of images are useless for helping a site rank further, maybe you would like to consider replacing them with texts or articles instead. They really help a lot in terms of SEO in the home page and onpage of a site.
On the issue of adding products, it is always welcome in the homepage especially if what you have is an eCommerce site.
Many early eCommerce sites use SEO unfriendly Shopping Carts/CMS that use a bad "mod rewrite" concept to create "SEO friendly" keyword URLs. This site has been design to have very flat navigation for "SEO" reasons but does not understand that all the work is for no gain because of the flaws in the CMS.
With the arrival of the enhanced web navigation systems like the CSS links, I think you are not going to need huge white spaces at the bottom or side parts of your web pages.
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