SEO Crunch

Good Landing Page

The Importance of a Good Landing Page The only way to measure the effectiveness of your search engine marketing campaign is through the reaction to your landing pages. Landing pages are the heart of the search engine optimization strategy, and your statistics will show whether or not you have done the work you need to in order to make sure your site works for you. Let’s take a look at what a landing page is and why it matters so much for the success of your web site.

What is a landing page? Basically a landing page is any page on your site where searchers “land” when they click a link on a search engine. Search engines rank pages according to formula known only to their staff but that is the subject of a lot of educated guess work and testing, and the better the criteria matches the material on your page the higher your landing page will be in the rankings.

There are two basic types of landing pages, both defined by the type of site you are running. Reference landing pages present information that the searcher is looking for; the value for the visitor is in the facts or entertainment they can glean from the page. For the web site developer, the success of the reference landing page is measured in the revenue of the advertising that is displayed on the page.

Transactional landing pages are landing pages which encourage a searcher to take a direct course of action, which can be anything from signing up for an account to simply filling out a form with some basic questions. While it might seem easier to create a successful reference landing page, creating a transitional landing page can be a lot more fun, especially if you really know what you are doing.

Major benefits of a landing page We have talked about the importance of landing pages as far as the monetization of a site, but landing pages are really the key to the success of your whole site. Here is a quick look at some other areas where a good landing page will really benefit your site.

A good landing page will lead searchers further in. No really good website consists of just one page with a bunch of writing on it. When you are designing your landing page(s) you should always look to encouraging visitors to delve deeper into what your site has to offer. A reference landing page with good links to other pages in the site will work to this purpose. With a transactional web site, a good landing page will tease visitors just enough to get them to fill out some information in order to learn more.

Good landing pages keep searchers coming back. Remember, the goal of your SEO campaign is to get people to come to your site, but you also want them to come back without having to go through the search engines again. Good landing pages will keep searchers coming back, with information that is updated regularly and teasers on what they can expect in the future. No matter what kind of web site you are developing, your landing pages matter because they will be where a searcher ends up after posing a query on one of the major search engines. Good landing pages are well researched as far as keywords and other SEO tools, and will be the focus of your search engine marketing strategy.

Additional Links What Do We Really Know About PageRank – Smashing Magazine