Very new here. I am in the process of reworking my website to be more SEO friendly. My question is about the homepage. Currently the site is divided between residential, commercial, and hydroponics products. Most products cross over to one or more of the 3 categories. If someone enters "duct fan" for example and my site comes up, will google's crawlers get stuck right at the home page because they don't know whether to follow the residential, commercial, or hydroponics path if it's not specified in the search? Would it be smarter to go from the home page to a general grouping of products and then break out by residential, commercial, hydroponics from there? Any advice or help anyone has would be appreciated.

Sorry, the web URL would help. suncourt.com

If you want engines to find information on duct fans you should talk about them more. Here is how Google sees one of your pages
http://209.85.207.104/search?q=cache:http://www.suncourt.com/Products.html&hl=en&strip=1

Also a good rule of thumb, never use "click here" for link anchor text.

Hi there,
first of all, I see a lot of work needed to be done to make it through ; ).
But speaking about "Would it be smarter to go from the home page to a general grouping of products and then break out by residential, commercial, hydroponics from there" - Do you want to create a separate general page for all the products together and put a link from your home page to that General Product Page?

It's obvious, that if somebody searches for "duct fan" and finds your website (home page or a specific product category page), then that person will find his way to the proper category or info as long as you provide it in a quality manner, not just worrying about search engines but about esthetic of the site.

Anyway, from my experience with our client who has 3 categories of products and whom we designed that site for, those 3 categories are posted on the home page linking to internal pages with specific products. So it's basically as you have now.

Thank you very much. Research is telling me there is a lot to do here. One more question if you don't mind. Is the home page any more important than any of the other pages on the site?

yes homepage gets the most inbound links... from all sorts of places

yep, home page is important, put some relevant content there