How to set up your affiliate site's homepage and navigation

Executive overview

Your homepage and navigation menu do more than welcome visitors — they drive conversions and move search authority to your most important pages. A homepage's three jobs are brand communication, directing visitors toward affiliate content, and passing PageRank to key pages via internal links. Your navigation menu must serve users and search engine crawlers equally.

The homepage is your most authoritative page — use it to boost the pages that earn commissions.

Three things your homepage should do

• State clearly what your site is about
• Link to your highest-value comparison and review pages so visitors reach affiliate content quickly
• Flow PageRank to important pages, lifting their rankings in Google

Homepage examples in practice

• Garage Gym Reviews links to "best-in-class" comparison posts from the homepage; all four rank first for their target keywords
• Dog Food Advisor links to its best dog food post (~60,000 monthly visits, ranks #1) and a reviews A–Z index page
• Both sites show that linking to money pages from the homepage directly improves their search performance

Navigation menu principles

• Primary goal: let visitors find content in two clicks or fewer from any page
• Secondary goal: give Google a clear path to crawl and index every page
• Removing links from a page breaks Google's discovery chain — keep nav links intact

Small vs large sites

• Small site: link directly to your main comparison posts and blog archive from the nav
• Large site: create category pages and link to those from the nav (e.g. Wirecutter uses Tech, Home, etc.)
• Category pages then link out to all relevant comparison posts beneath them

Where this fits in site planning

• Complete after keyword research and content mapping (lessons 3.1–3.3)
• Homepage and nav can be updated at any time — don't wait for perfection
• Next step: create the actual affiliate content