Glad to hear you are taking an active interest in your own website design from an SEO standpoint. As the SEO Director for InterCoastal Net Designs, I am available to answer all of your questions in this area.
First and foremost, yes it is very important to have at least some text on your home page for the search engines to analyze.
This is one of the pieces that they use to determine what your website is all about. Without this piece, you leave too much ambiguity that
could end up hurting your keyword focus down the road. Typically 1-2 paragraphs of text will be sufficient to target a specific local area and niche market with a
tight range of keywords. Of course, the more areas you cover, and the more specialties, services or product categories your business has, the more information you have available to discuss about your company.
You do also want to be sure that the text is visible to your website visitors. Many have tried in the past to hide text using various techniques but Google has taken a stand to penalize sites for displaying different content to search engines than to regular browsers... and you do not want to be at the receiving end of a penalty like that.
Be sure to include your top geographic market keywords in the text (Hilton Head real estate, Hilton Head homes, etc.) at least 2-3 times each in the home page text (more times may be necessary with greater amounts of body content) to be sure your website performs well for Google Local Search results in your area. Also feel free to bulk it up with some of your other related product or service-related keywords your company provides.
If you follow these general suggestions you will be on the right track for getting started with creating some quality home page text optimized for performance. Using this foundation, we also typically fine tune and tweak the page content here and there over time until we get the exact keyword densities correct as well but it always helps to have something for the search engines to start with like this so that we can see exactly which phrases need extra help in the code.
Good luck and feel free to contact me at InterCoastal Net Designs if you want to take your website content and SEO to the next level to really see the improvements in the search results that you were looking for.
Adam Hankey
SEO Director
InterCoastal Net Designs
www.icoastalnet.com
adam@icoastalnet.com
Toll Free: 866-249-6095
