Landing Pages

When it comes to landing pages, there are two different needs. One is for landing pages that are designed from the beginning when you first set up your site. Your home page, of course, and a few secondary pages. These are search engine optimized to get on the SERPs; they are part of your full out range of tactics for ranking which includes content, keywords, and linking.

You want your home page to be the epitome of your whole vision – when people land there they go “Oh, yes, this is where I need to be.” It needs to be clear and concise, and have a distinct layout that tells the window shoppers where to go next as well as a call to action for the eager to snag the instant sale.

You can achieve the best results with your home page if you use it for click through from the SERPs and optimize accordingly for your search terms. Don’t clutter it up too much, and make sure you have a way back to it from the other pages on your site.

Your secondary landing pages are helpful if your listing contains information from your site map, so people can go directly to an inner page for instance, on the famous pet clothing site it would be ‘cat clothing’ or ‘dog clothing’ or even ‘the sale barn’.

These are optimized as well for specific keyword search, and can help your rankings rise. The visitors to these pages will almost always have clicked either ion your SERPs listing or on a link out there on the web.

The other type of landing page is usually associated with an ad program, and is more specific. For my ‘Home Dawg Hoodies’ line I will definitely want ads specifically targeted to my niche market, and consumer traffic they generate will be clicking straight through to this landing page. I can do the same for my other main pages for my categories; ‘Kitty Kapes’, ‘Doggie Duds’, and ‘The Animal Outfitters’.

As my site expands, I may have specific landing pages tied to very specific products. These may be very similar (such team oriented or color specific searches) and I may start having trouble coming up with new and varied content for all these very similar pages.

The good news is, I don’t have to. “What about duplicate content?” you say. Not a problem. I simply include a note in my robots.txt file to disallow these pages. They aren’t for SEO, they are for ad conversion, so I don’t lose anything by putting them in another room to do their job.

Once I have optimized my visible landing pages and disallowed my ad oriented ones, I can start searching for under-utilized pages further down in my site that get a lot of traffic even though I haven’t optimized for their keywords as aggressively. I can pinpoint where my next point of concentration should be, to grow any small, available corner of the market into my personal money maker!

Tomorrow: When Ten is More Than a Hundred – Playing the Odds

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