Landing pages

Michael Martinez at SEO Theory wrote a great post today about "landing pages". I have always stressed the importance of landing pages, and optimized the pages of my site to rank for particular keywords. The key to landing pages is discovering what are the most important pages of your site that you want customers to find. I hate "about us" pages, and I believe the "about" information should be a blip on the home page, and the "home page" is probably the least important page of any website, unless it is a blog.

Each page on your web site should be optimized for 4 or 5 key phrases, every page targets different search terms. This will give your 5 page site the chance to rank for 20 or 25 different terms. Sales and product pages have to have optimized content on them, not just pictures and prices. Sometimes it is hard to get the client to go for so much text and you may have to do a bit of research and use more creativity, but it will payoff in the end.

Link building should be done site wide, I usually don't try to get many links to my home pages. Switch up your anchor text in comments and link exchanges to accommodate the key words for the target page. Really examine the content on the page your link will be from and choose the page on your web site that would benefit most from the link. If you do gain a lot of links to one page on your web site, make sure you direct some anchor text on that page to a weaker page on the site, don't keep all that juice on one page, optimizing your internal linking structure can dramatically improve your rankings.

Pages with good CTAs are great for landing pages, they bring the user to your site and tell them where to go next. If you bring all of your traffic to your home page, you are relying on the user finding their way to your sales pages, and that is unreliable. I am not saying that your clientele is dumb or lazy, but that it is your job to direct traffic to where you want it most.

As an SEO, it is your job to direct the most qualified traffic to the best page for it, and the 9 out of 10 times the home page is the last place you want someone to start looking to buy something. So optimize your landing pages and watch your sales increase.