The Ecommerce Blog

Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers.

While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

The page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here are 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

- Relevant Content

A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.

- Multiple Landing Pages

A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on a specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on a specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.

- Focus on Functionality

More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.

- Call To Action

You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear and highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.

- Send a Clear Message

Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.

- Offer Incentive

Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more than your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials. 

- Make Visitors Stay

Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.

- Simple is Better

Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.

- Power of Freebies

Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the
customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.

- Testing

In a recent post “How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers”, I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you a true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion.

Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean a website’s success or failure.

About the Author
Joanna Colek is the owner of Joanna Ciolek Web Design Studio, based in North Denver, Colorado. She offers affordable, custom and effective web design services to small business owners.

So you want to get free advertising, traffic and back links from the multitude of social networks out there but you don’t know which to use and what to do. Hopefully today you’ll learn a few useful tips to boost your profile and maximize the buzz of social networks.

Where To Start?

Digg is hard to use unless you’ve been around a while. It’s top users really flex their collective muscle when it comes to dominating the front page. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your articles - Not at all - Adding your articles to Digg, making tons off friends and testing the water is well worth it. Chances are you WON’T make the front page, but if you do……traffic jackpot.

Propeller is fast to use, which means you can get in and out with much fuss, so I highly recommend adding your link there.

Stumble Upon is nowhere near as good as it was and you have to stumble a ton of site to get and credibility. You should add your profile and your blog/site, but don’t expect the promise you may hear.

Reddit is pretty good and low effort so definitely give it a try.

Delicious is a little bit of a pain - The tool bar you have to download is annoying and the whole submission process could be handled better, but if your site gets buzz from delicious then it will all be worth the fuss.

The key to the major sites is to make friends, comment on articles and be positive. You will get reciprocal votes, as long as you appear genuine and give someone a value of sorts.

Twitter - Here is a little trick for twitter to get an extra “dofollow” link. You get to add your website or blog, but if you stick your site url in your bio entry, you’ll get an extra “dofollow” link. A nicve little bonus.

Using Myspace and Facebook - These two can be useful as you just upload your links on your profile and add friends galore. People who follow you on Social Networks have a greater trust for you and therefore your site or blog, making preselling easier. The slot machine chat room on Facebook is a great way to find new friends to add.

Pligg Sites

These mini “Digg” sites are worth a mention as they when used properly , help you build up some nice little traffic. Pligg sites are Digg clones and as such are easy to submit and vote on. They a much smaller so they won’t get you anywhere near as much traffic, but because they are small they are easier to dominate and make the front page.

Just like the big social bookmarking networks, Pligg sites work by you submitting a link and then others vote on it. You can add friends and get more votes, which is always a good strategy.

The best Pligg based sites are Topstumbles, DropJack and StuffDaily.

Using these can help get you the extra traffic boost you want to take your “numbers” to the next level.

About the Author
Andrew Templar studies social marketing sites for anomalies and loopholes. Being in the “know” is extremely useful for boosting the marketability of a website.

One of the most problematic and confusing issues most webmasters have with Google concerns linking. How your links are ranked? How you should link out? How you should construct your internal links? How you should get more inbound links? How many links should you have on a page? And the list of questions goes on…

Perhaps, the most annoying aspect for the struggling webmaster, has been Google’s secrecy in how it actually ranks links and pages. Google’s whole PageRank and Ranking Algorithm is so complex that no one can fully boast they understand how the whole system works.

Google’s ranking secrecy and complexity has probably been well-planned mainly because there are millions of webmasters who would like to “game” the Google Algorithm and achieve high keyword rankings through manipulation with so-called “black-hat” SEO techniques and reverse engineering.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if this whole secrecy and complexity is more of a smokescreen rather than an actual deception on Google’s part. What if the keys to the kingdom are actually yours for the taking? What if the solution is hiding in plain sight for everyone to see? What if the secret to high rankings in Google is not a secret at all? Wouldn’t that be a hoot!

Actually, that’s not a far-fetched assumption to make, mainly because many of Google’s linking policies and recommendations are freely given by Google. Whether you can believe Google is actually giving you the goods is another issue that we’ll put on the back-burner for another day; but for now, Google’s advice on link building is rather generous and informative.

As a part of Links Week held recently, Google’s Maile Ohye gave some pointers on what Google is looking for and how it does its index ranking. No big surprise that content and inbound links are the two most important factors. This is what most SEO experts have been saying for years.

A site’s content is one of the main factors. Therefore, you should have a compelling site with interesting information and/or offer quality products, entertainment, opinions…

(Quoting Maile Ohye)

“One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site. As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our
ranking.”

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

“As many of you know, relevant, quality inbound links can affect your PageRank (one of many factors in our ranking algorithm). And quality links often come naturally to sites with compelling content or offering a unique service.”

(End Quote)

Then Maile Ohye explained further how to create unique and compelling content for your site:

(Quoting Maile Ohye)

- Start a blog: make videos, do original research, and post interesting stuff on a regular basis. If you’re passionate about your site’s topic, there are lots of great avenues to engage more users.

- Teach readers new things, uncover new news, be entertaining or insightful, show your expertise, interview different personalities in your industry and highlight their interesting side. Make your site worthwhile.

- Participate thoughtfully in blogs and user reviews related to your topic of interest. Offer your knowledgeable perspective to the community.

- Provide a useful product or service. If visitors to your site get value from what you provide, they’re more likely to link to you.

(End Quote)

SEO experts have been telling webmasters for years that creating valuable, unique, relevant useful content is one of the best ways to get your site and pages highly ranked in Google. If you create valuable content, then other sites will want to link to you naturally.

Linking out to other sites should be done in a “common sense” manner and it’s a way of offering value to your visitor’s experience. We expect helpful relevant links when we visit other sites since it’s a natural way a good quality site should work; so be careful of linking out to spammy sites that only offer pages of links with very little or no unique content.

There are several things every prudent webmaster should be checking like making sure your site hasn’t been hacked and hidden links placed on your site without your knowledge; those with WordPress blogs should be installing the latest security measures and updates. Make sure you keep checking all your outbound links regularly since you may initially link out to a valuable resource, but over time this page may be closed or replaced with one of those spammy-links-holding pages. It can happen to the best of us.

What has confused things lately is all the “link buying” which Google greatly discourages and has shown its displeasure by de-ranking many paid directories. The size of your “wallet” shouldn’t be the determining factor in how pages and content are ranked. If you’re selling a link, it should have the “no-follow” tag so that it doesn’t pass PageRank along and confuse the system. Policing or deciding what is or what is not a “paid link” has become a major problem for the search engines, including Google.

You should not have more than “100 links on a page” as this can overload the search engine robots that regularly crawl the web, indexing pages. Likewise, your site’s “linking architecture” should be natural and easy for both your visitors and the robots to follow. Make sure your important pages are no more than a few clicks away from your homepage.

As to interior linking, the two main points being: Intuitive Navigation for your visitors and Crawlable Text Links for the search engine robots. Use descriptive anchor text links that explain your content to your visitors. The anchor text is the underlined clickable part of the link and many SEO experts suggest you place your keywords or variations of them in your anchor text.

Make sure your site is transparent. Do not use “link cloaking” on your site. Make sure what your visitor sees is what the robots are indexing. Use a 301 Redirect if you have permanently moved any webpages. Again, there is stressed the need for a sitemap as this can be very helpful for both your visitors and robots to see and find all your valuable content. Make sure you have a sitemap and all your
important pages are listed on it.

One final note, many professional webmasters and marketers don’t worry about PageRank as much as they are concerned with SERPs. Getting those top rankings for their sites in the search engine results is what really matters. Again, quality content and building quality links play an important role in achieving those top spots and maybe Google has already given you the formula for getting them. Maybe, maybe not.

About the Author
The author is a full-time online marketer who runs numerous web sites, including two sites on Internet marketing. For the latest web marketing tools try: http://www.bizwaremagic.com Discover more about linking and ranking directly from Google here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com 2008 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.