A home page is the entrance of the website. Now if you have good content on the site, you attract the Search engines to crawl it and give you keyword rank. But too much content is not liked by actual users. The confusion comes here, Shall we put just "To the Point" things on home page and direct users to Specific pages? Or shall we have Lot of content so Search Engine Crawls it and Brings us traffic through searches? What if we have less content, Search engine doesn't give keyword rank, what if we have content, user comes to site but he doesn't find it interesting. Lets debate.
I think the landing page is a good place to introduce the visitors to what your site has to offer. I tend to summarize the different sections of my website and place them on the home page in clear, separate paragraphs with h2 heading. That way visitors can skim through the content and go to sections they may be interested in. At the end of the day you need to create websites for users, not search engines but you can try to find a balance between the two.
Absolutely .. and sometimes , putting a little content in the front page may be useful for visitors I love the front page of yahoo for example .. If we put links to illustrate some examples .. that will be better ..
You have to create the website for the users. Never create a website for the search engines, you won't get far.
The crawlers are attracted not from one big page. They are attracted from big fresh and unique content. It doesn't matter on how much pages the content is. So my suggestion is to make the site easy to browse for the users and then think about the crawlers. Good luck!
I think cracked.com has a good setup. The top of the page is filled with new stories and content, it's easy to navigate, and fairly simple. Then if you scroll down, you are given access to a much larger supply of content.