Most of the time, when you visit a website, the homepage is the first page you see. So your homepage needs to make a good first impression. You need to captivate your audience within a matter of seconds. But don’t overlook impressing those search engine bots too!
One thing that a lot of people probably don’t realise is, that search engines don’t see a website the same as you or I. They don’t see any images, they don’t see colour, so they don’t judge your website on how good it looks. They see a text version of you site with all the prettiness stripped out of it. So you need to consider this when designing your website. No one’s going to be able to find your pretty website if search engine bots can’t read it.