The Importance of Landing Pages
February 3, 2011
To make your business website as effective as it can be, it should have landing pages specific to what a prospective customer is looking for.
A landing page is dedicated to one thing – serving up exactly what a person is seeking and making it easy for then to obtain what they want.
Landing pages are extremely important if you are running a PPC campaign. When someone clicks on a link they want to be taken to exactly what was promised in the ad, not to your home page.
The PPC landing page should be simpler in design than your other site pages, with fewer options and a distinct “call to action” – meaning a way for them to easily contact you / download / purchase your product from that page. It should be designed for your PPC campaign, and my advice is to block search engines from it, since you will have other pages you will want to rank in search results.
Landing Page Effectiveness
The Sherpa marketing chart below shows how effective unique landing pages are for websites.
Effectiveness of Website Design, Management, and Optimization Tactics
If you are not running a PPC campaign, should you still have landing pages on your site? Definitely! In your link building efforts, such as article marketing, your keyword link should connect to a page on your site that is specifically about the article‘s topic.
Sculpting Your Pages
For instance, let’s say you have a site that sells pet products. If you have written and syndicated an article about dog harnesses, the link should lead directly to a page that is about nothing but dog harnesses. Your visitor should be able to get all the info they need about the product from this page, as well as be able to place an order.
You don’t necessarily have to add more pages to your site to do this. Just make sure that the pages on your website that you lead people to are designed to encourage a prospective buyer to do just that – buy your product. It may mean refining some of the pages on your site or breaking down a page that is covering too many products into separate pages for each distinct product.
In other words, don’t have regular collars and leashes featured along with dog harnesses. This is not to say they should not be able to move on to those products. It’s smart to have a “related products” box in a sidebar, but the main page should be about the harnesses you carry…sizes, colors, styles, along with information on how to put them on a dog and why they may be better than a regular collar for your dog.
Along with helping your sales conversions, it will also help the page rank for dog harnesses, since it’s the focus of the page; there is content about the product, pictures of the product with keywords in the name (i.e. cane-corso-dog-harness.jpg) and of course you have used keywords in your title to help the page rank, as well as carefully written a Meta description to encourage searchers to click to your site.
Review Your Website
Your homework for today is to go through your website and see if you need to break down some of your pages into product specific landing pages. Making changes like this is not usually hard or terribly time consuming – especially if you have a template in place. You do need to spend the necessary time it takes to determine the best keywords to use for your title and H tags, write some great content, and again, create a Meta description that will make searchers want to visit your site.
Your reward will be higher search rankings, more visitors, and higher conversions (sales).
Keep Your Google Rankings While Updating Your Site
February 3, 2011
With a new project ahead, I have been concerned about how to keep my client’s awesome Google rankings while updating her website to one that is more current and functional.
Consequently, I was very happy to find this article in the Axandra newsletter, and have received permission to publish it in full.
How your web page changes influence your search engine rankings.
It’s a no-brainer that changes on your web pages influence the position of your website on search engines. However, it’s not so clear how search engines react to the changes on your site and what exactly causes the changes in the search results. A new search engine patent might have some answers.
Several search engine patents deal with the changes on your site.
Google published a patent that described how the changes on your web pages influence the rankings of your site 6 years ago. Last month, Microsoft was granted another patent that discusses the influence of web page changes on search engine rankings.
This new patent shows which elements on your web pages might be monitored by search engines.
Which web page elements are monitored by search engines?
According to the new patent, changes of the following web page elements can influence the position of the page in the search results:
- Keywords that are included in a web page.
- Keywords that are associated with a web page
- The anchor texts that are used in links on the page.
- The colors and the sizes of images on the page.
- The position of text or images on the page.
- The frequency of document changes over time.
- The amount of the web page content that has been changed.
- Tags that are assigned to the page.
- Search queries that are used to find the page.
How exactly do changes in these elements influence the rankings of a page?
According to the patent, searches are classified into the two categories “informational” and “navigational”. The effect of the web page changes depends on the category of a search query.
A navigational query is a query that is used to find a particular site. For example, a search for “ny times” will lead to the home page of the sites. Examples for information queries are “how do I fix a broken bicycle tire” or “who won the 2011 XYZ awards”?
If the searcher is looking for information about a recent event (2011 XYZ awards) then pages that recently added the keyword could be boosted in the search results.
For navigational queries, pages with static content might get a boost. This methods works fine with some type of sites but it could cause problems with home pages that update their contents regularly (for example nytimes.com).
What does this mean to your website?
This patent was granted to Microsoft but it’s likely that Google uses similar methods. Search engines don’t just look at the current version of your website.
They also remember how it was in the past. The changes on your website could indicate a change of ownership, they could indicate that you try to keep your website up-to-date, they could be a signal for spam and more.
When you change your web pages, consider which signal you might be sending to search engines.
When you optimize the pages of your website, do not optimize a page that already has high rankings for one of your keywords. Better optimize another page of your site for the new keyword.
The more pages of your website you optimize, the better. Optimize different pages of your website for different but related keywords to show search engines that your website is relevant to a particular topic.
Keep some of the pages fresh and leave others as they are to offer search engines different kind of pages for different search queries.
“Copyright Axandra.com – Web site promotion software“
The Visitor’s Impact on Search Ranking
February 3, 2011
This is a guest article by Amit from SEO-Gavish at
The influence of the visitor
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the visitor’s contribution to the SEO process.
The opinions are different: some are claiming that the influence of each visitor is very high and Google is counting every visitor that left his credentials or made any other interaction during his site browsing.
Others are saying a visitor’s influence is minor and there is no way that Google will count visitors’ behavior during site ranking.
So which is the right one?
I would like to make some order in this matter and explain how the traffic affects the site ranking. I would like to emphasis a few points:
It’s not about the amount of traffic, but about its quality and about the visitor’s experience during the browsing of the site. In the past we used to think that the amount of visitors is crucial.
Let’s start with the basic SEO technique: Inbound Link Building
Every SEO person uses this technique in order to get higher Google ranking. The question is "What influence the visitor has to the link?"
Every time you are creating a link you need to think will this link contribute to the visitor and he will be able to use it or is it located on a page that no one is visiting. The purpose of the links is that visitors could follow them to our site. The problem is that today links are created mostly for the Google spider and without any though about the visitor.
Conclusion: It’s worth the effort to create useful links which will be followed by the visitors, a "live" link.
Till now we discussed the link building strategy, let’s continue.
The visitor is searching for the results in Google and gets a list of results. Your site is not the only one in the list, so the visitor will check other sites as well.
The visitor stages of behavior:
First, the visitor is looking at the list and decides which result he wants to click on and review. At this stage the visitor is directly influencing the ranking. If your site is located at the first page or in the first place, but visitor is not clicking on it, Google will understand that the site is not liked by visitors. (In some cases changing the description of the site will solve the problem).
Next stage will be viewing the site. So time of site viewing is an additional parameter of visitor influence. If the visitor is leaving your site during seconds, Google will understand that your site is not relevant or problematic. It is important to understand the next action of the visitor after leaving your site. Did he searched for the same value again and found more relevant site which he viewed longer? Or did he close his browser?
Reasons that may cause the visitor to leave your site quickly:
1. The visitor didn’t find what he looked for – your site is not relevant for the search request
2. The content of the site is not written well, unprofessional or not readable.
3. The site is designed badly and the graphics are poor. These days, the visitor is looking for an impressive site.
4. Menu and sidebars, site hierarchy and content are not clear enough. You must make the effort and plan a site that will be user friendly and clear enough so the visitor will enjoy using it without any effort.
5. Site upload speed is too slow. As our connection speed grows higher, the visitor’s patience becomes lower. The visitor will not wait for the site to be shown; he will look for other sites.
The influence of toolbars and connecting to Google sites accounts
Anyone who is familiar with the Alexa scale knows that it gathers the surfing information of Alexa users and ranks the sites based on that. Google is gathering information from any user logged on in Gmail or other Google account. Surfing the web using the Google toolbar is a highly effective information source. Google Chrome, although it is a relatively new browser, is used as an information source as well.
A few additional myths about the influence of human activity:
“A web site that is connected to Google Analytics will be ranked higher if the requests for additional information are created in it." I disagree with this statement, as this value can be easily falsely created, that’s the reason I find it hard to believe that it affects Google ranking. There is a difference between the request for additional information and actual sale in the web site.
An additional opinion I have heard recently is that amount of "LIKEs" the site is getting is influencing its ranking. This value can easily be a fraud, moreover, Google can’t read the "LIKE" source code.
These are a few examples of the human activity influence on the site ranking. It is important to understand that one of the aspects of SEO work is to make sure that the site will be relevant and user friendly, so that the visitor will find the information he was looking for and the site appearance will be welcoming.
Once your website looks great and has interesting, professional and relevant content, you will earn the visitor’s confidence he will come to your site again and he will not search for this information in a different website.
Good luck
Thank you, Amit, for sending us this article. You’ve made valid observations about the visitor’s affect on search rankings.
