PitchPersuasion

Landing pages are an incredibly effective SEO & PPC tool when creating websites. Especially if you have a certain aspect of your company which you would like to promote.
Two things that you might want to promote:

• A product/service range
• A specific service/product

Two reasons to create landing pages:

• It will increase your search ranking if done properly
• You will sell/promote more product, for free or less than its currently costing

Put very simply it is:
“Creating pages for individual products and tailoring the content for both the product and how your visitor has reached your page”

Landing pages for SEO

Let us take an example simple website: http://www.greatpeople4events.co.uk

This site has four pages: Welcome, about us, event staff & contact us.

Across these there is probably a limited scope for optimising against lots of different keywords. However by adding lots of sub-pages this company could appear on lots of searches.

Consider the following, the company may operate in one geographic areas, say London, and from the list of staff types at the bottom they have seventeen different types of staff. It might be sensible therefore to have the following:

A landing page for each type of staff in each geographic area:

• /london-registration-staff/
• /london-ushers-and-stewards
• /london…

These could be linked from the bottom of the first page on each of the job types. This would mean that anyone googling to the site would land an a page describing exactly the type of service that they want. This is proven to lead to higher conversion rates.

Landing pages for Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

If you are paying Google/Yahoo/MSN.. for search you should definately have landing pages for each of your keywords. Consider the following examples assuming that you have paid for an exact phrase match on “London Registration Staff” and that you have a custom ad for it rather than a generic company one.

Example 1 - No landing page
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/event-staff/

Your visitor will be taken straight to your home page or maybe even your ‘Event Staff’ page.
Problems:

• They will not get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad less relevant and may charge you more, lower position, higher cost

Example 2 - Landing pages for each service
Sponsored Google Ad:
London Registration Staff
We offer professional ad-hoc registration staff anwhere in London at short notice, click above to find out more. www.staffingcompany.com/london-registration-staff/

Your visitor will be taken to a page which details the service that they are looking for, hopefully with lots of relevant information which will make them want to buy from you.
Advantages:

• They will get a message which is customised to what they have clicked on
• Google will find your ad relevant and may charge you less, higher position, lower cost

Final considerations

Finally you may want to consider creating separate pages for the SEO & PPC landing pages. The reason for this is that your SEO’d pages are likely to be much more permanent than the PPC pages. PPC campaigns can change from month/week/day to month/week/day whereas SEO can take weeks/months to achieve your goal.
This theory can apply to any type of site from an e-commerce site to a site promoting a brand.

I hope you have found this useful!

Legal Disclaimer: I/We take no responsibility/liability for the results of implementing any of the actions suggested above. It is possible to reduce your google rankings as well as increase them and if you are in any doubt I would suggest talking to an SEO expert.

SEO has become one of the most important factors online with more and more consideration being put into it Year-On-Year.  One area which is often overlooked is the optimisation of a domain name/brand.

The first consideration for domain name SEO is based on whether you are aiming to develop a brand or simply a mindless website.  Most would probably say yes, that they are either developing a brand or a mini/micro-site for a brand.

Second one must consider two of factors which most search engines notably Google hold in high regard for domain names:

-Age of the domain: Older domains will be considered more important especially if they have had a consistent keyword theme.

-Inbound links (IBLs): Everyone knows that the more links they get pointing to their site the better, especially if they are from other sites with high pagerank.

With these two considerations in mind lets look at two examples.

Example 1: LeWeb

Context: LeWeb is one of the largest annual events which is focused around Internet entrepreneurs each year in Paris.

Why: This is an example which I would consider to be the ‘wrong’ way to go around keeping your brand alive and increasing its web presence year-on-year/campaign-on-campaign.

Problem: When I search for LeWeb on Google, the first result I come across is from the event in 2007 and not the more recent 2008 edition. Quel Disastre !

Solution: The easiest solution for them to follow would be to use their leweb.net address and create a sub-domain for each year/event. e.g.  http://2007.leweb.net, http://2008.leweb.net.. and so on.  This works especially well if you have a different developer/agency working on your site each year.

Alternatively they could simply have www.leweb.net/2007/, www.leweb.net/2008/…  Often simplicity is the key!

Example 2: Carsonified

Context: An events company focussed on running events for developers and entrepreneurs in the UK.

Why?: Because they’re doing it right!

Examples:

FOWA London 2008: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

FOWA Dublin 2009: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/london/

Conclusion: New domain names for brands which you want to keep alive year on year need to be under the same core domain name. The examples here are for events however it applies to everything from sites which release annual reports through to mini/micro-sites.

This week my main post is slightly delayed so I’ve added a small ‘tapas’ feature to help out people who are launching new sites and campaigns online. If you are really sensible you might even build it into a pitch and bill the time you spend doing it!

Essential Hit List

1. To even vaguely give the world a chance at finding your site, bookmark your page (and every page/post your create) using Del.icio.us (1min) or even better using Social Marker (30min+ if you do all the social bookmarking sites).

2. Get a twitter account (30secs) and email all your clients & prospects with the details (30secs) and use it as a news ticker of what you do each day including links to your site (1min a day).

3. Add a listing on DMOZ, it’s regarded as one of the most important directories for sites to be listed. (2mins)

4. Post a constructive comment each day on a blog that you read regularly including a link back to your site. (30sec)

5. Create news, move from: ‘We started work on a new project today’ to ‘x agency/company started work for x company today’ and syndicate it using NowPublic and email it to the right people at places like Brand Republic & Mad.co.uk. (30sec)

In reality to get started it may take you a bit more than 5 minutes to start doing everything here but if you get into a rhythm it should really help build up your audience.