A homepage consisting of nothing more than a search form and a few words (good/bad idea?, will it show up in SERP?)

Question

I am working on a portal and for my homepage, I want to present the user with a search form which requires the user to type in a word (or search query) in order to search for information on my site. The page (which happens to be my homepage) has very few words and is actually modelled on Google home page.

I am wondering, since Googlebot (and other crawlers) will not type a query and 'submit' it - whether Googlebot will only be seeing an effecively 'blank' page for my homepage - which inevitably, can't be good for SEO.

In caqse my assumption of Googlebot seeing a blank page is correct, I have an idea to get around it - but since I am new at this, I would much rather wait and see if someone (more experienced) has a similar (or better idea).

Any comments/advice (pros/cons) on such an approach as described above?

Answer 1

If you look at the answer to this question you can see that Google may choose to put something in your search box and see what the results are.

So the best way to tell Google and other search engines about the pages on your site is to create a sitemap - see http://www.sitemaps.org/. You could also put a "sitemap" link at the bottom of the page linking to a page which then has links to every page on your site.

Answer 2

you have have a home page with little to no content and it can be indexed and rank. This is true is you are targeting a very specific keyword phrase with no competition.