SEO for an almost blank index page

Question

I have this website where the index.html is basically empty, just having an empty container div and few navigation links. I use JavaScript to load other html content based on user's click on the navigation links.

My question is that whether this is bad for SEO. When a bot crawls the page, the only thing it will find is the empty div and a few meta tags and navigation right?

Should I try to add content to the index page? If the almost empty page is bad, are there other ways I can optimize the page for SEO?

Answer 1

It's not really as black or white as that...

It depends on what the purpose of the index.html page is, you should be asking questions such as these before thinking about SEO value:-

• What kind of website is it?
• What is the purpose of the homepage (index.html)?
• Is it usable / beneficial to the visitors?
• Will their ever be a requirement / intention to rank the homepage in organic search for non branded terms (i.e competitive keywords).

Only then, can you really establish whether your scenario will be "bad for SEO". If your inner pages will contain the valuable content that needs to be ranked organically, then this will still be achievable with minimal content on the homepage.

Depending on how you're loading the content with javascript, it is also possible that a search engine may still be able to crawl and index this content.

Answer 2

I would add a meta title and description - you can then rewrite them using JavaScript but they should be there for the core page.

I would recommend searching for SEO info on the official Google Webmaster Help channel.