Out with the old ways of designing a website where there is a traditional landing (home) page and more basic interior pages.  We all know that search engines have been ranking individual pages rather than core domains for a long time now. So why are we still designing sites with static interior pages?

Our interior pages, posts, archives, download pages, login pages, including anything and everything on your site has to be more dynamic and be ready for direct traffic from users.

If you’re running a frequently updated site (blog, news site, etc…) a user is probably among the minority if they arrive on your homepage.  Instead they are arriving at your site either from searching a specific topic or asking a specific question which gets answered by a post you’ve written or someone they know / trust is sharing a link with them.  Either way they are bypassing the homepage.

Internal linking strategies, widgets, related posts lists and more all strive to help us find the next best thing on the site.  Give me as many non obtrusive reasons to stay on your site, show me interesting articles, or what other people are commenting on and I will be more than happy to stay on your site all afternoon.

They aren’t, because homepage is an arbitrary term. In the past we went “home” to find our way back to the content we were looking for.  Now I can arrive at a site and spend minutes on it (in internet time that’s like hours) without every going to the homepage.

See more at www.searchenginejournal.com