Landing pages and SEO

Landing pages are pages that you land in after clicking on a link. The link could be on the Search Engine Ranking page or it could be a link on an Ad you’ve placed.

In my opinion every page of your web site is a potential landing page and should be designed keeping that in mind. From the SEO perspective each page should look complete; a visitor arriving at any of your internal pages should not feel confused.

Sometimes there is a need of creating focused landing pages if they are created just for the Ads and are linked to the Ad url only. For instance if you display an ad on Google that says something like-

50% discount on shoes
http://www.xyz.com/yourpage.html
Your favorite shoes at
half price offer ends June 15

Clicking the ad should bring you to a page that displays just that, shoes at 50% discounted price, if you page displays anything else, you have lost your potential customers. A promise is a commitment and needs to be fulfilled. Your ad message has to be in complete synchrony with your landing page, else you are setting yourself  up for failure.

For campaigns such as these, you may or may not want to provide too many links on that page because that might distract the potential customer into clicking away. Testing out different landing pages in such cases really help.

For a regular internal page in a website, you need to have the same kind of focus. Starting from the link name, to the title, and content of the page, relevance has to be kept in mind. Landing page and SEO go hand in hand mostly because a landing page has to be relevant, has to have the key ingredients of a SEO page; like relevant title, content and keywords. All of these help in retaining the interest of a visitor.

Good quality and relevant pages can contribute towards a wonderful user experience, and that is really precious. Every page in your website has a potential. Optimize every page and make sure these pages are within two clicks from the home page.

I will take up landing pages in detail in my next post.