Landing Page Strategies

What is a landing page? It is the exact opposite of a homepage. Basically, homepages are general in theme, while landing pages are specific.

Home pages are the front door to your website, and so it used to be the main way that visitors were introduced to your company, your products, and your vision. Homepages have to be general in purpose, and often have lots of choices for the visitor. After all, who knows how they found your site and what they are interested in?

Increasingly, though, websites rely on landing pages to showcase their goods and services. Rather than trying to display everything you have to offer, a landing page is designed with one purpose in mind. What that one purpose is depends on your site's needs. It could be a sales letter for new software, or it could be an opt-in page for subscription. Or, it may be an informational piece that highlights one of your products. Whatever it does, the landing page should do it in singularity!

Landing pages are popular because they shorten the "browsing" time of a potential customer or client. There is no question what the website is directing the visitor to do - so the visitor only has to make one choice: continue down the road, or disembark completely. Because of this, landing pages have a built-in "risk factor," but most find that the risk is worth it because their conversions typically increase when landing pages are used effectively.

So remember:

Homepage = everything and the kitchen sink.
Landing Pages = specific content designed to elicit a specific action.

What makes landing pages so important is that they are so focused. They are literally honed in like a laser on a specific idea, product, or problem that your website can solve. This level of detail makes the page easy to be found in the search engines for the more specific search terms that people enter into Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other search engines.

So here's some tips for optimizing your landing pages for search:

1. Use Your Keywords in the Title of the page, as well as the meta description and meta-keywords.

2. Link to the landing page from another page on your site using the same or similar keywords - this really helps cement the authority of the page in the eyes of the search engines.

3. Make sure there are at least 400 words (in html) on the page. Webpages that have all the text embedded in flash or video are not favored in the search engines. This also increases your "page reputation."

4. Now go out and promote your landing page! This includes not only paid search, but also by writing articles for directories, or asking to be a guest blogger on another similar (but not directly competing) webpage.

For more marketing tips, as well as more 60 second videos, visit us at the 60 Second Marketer.