Articles published to front page do not show

Hello. I understand that this template was developed to be search engine friendly. I have had a couple of questions that might be related to this. These might be elementary questions...sorry for this:

1. Why if I publish an article and also publish it to the front page I can not see it on front page?

2. Why is a module used for welcome message on front page instead of an article published to front page?

I was wondering if these template settings were made for search engine reasons. If so, great.. but was also concerned that I am not using joomla as it was made to be used with articles on front page, etc. and as a newbie I might not be setting up site using best practices.

I like the welcome module, but was also thinking of posting some rotating articles on front page from time to time like "message from administrator"... or "New arrivals" etc. and not sure how with template. Thanks again for great support. Scott

1. Please make sure that default menu item (the one marked with asterisk) is set to Frontpage type and that you have set appropriate number of articles in the menu item parameters.

2. Because we wanted this template to be different than the others It's not mandatory to use an article on the home page.

Ok, I see now how to make the articles visible. Is there any benefit from SEO to use the Module or would it be better to enter the same information into an article instead? Is there any other benefit of using the module? Is there a way for me to keep my welcome message in the module and have other articles show beneath the module instead of above [before] it? Thanks

Regarding the SEO, you should decide what keywords you are optimizing. Say, it's "fashion store". You should include these keywords in the page title tag, in H1 and H2 tags, in image alt attributes, between <b> or <strong> tags, etc. Also, you should find many relevant websites to link to your website, using the keywords as anchor text. You should submit a proper sitemap to Google. Older domain = better positioning, and many other aspects.

It's certainly not just about publishing articles or modules.