This brief article is to look at the basics for SEO, explain the use of a landing page and why you need to make absolutely sure that SEO techniques are used properly to optimise your landing pages if you are to get the very best out of your advertising budget. This article is suitable for an absolute beginner or those who have a little experience with web marketing.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation in full, is the practice of getting your web presence noticed by the search engines. The big search engines are Google, Yahoo and MSN and while there are hundreds of others these are the three you need to concentrate on. The reason why is because the bulk of traffic to your website will be driven there by the Big 3 search engines. If you do not optimise your web pages for them then effectively your online store will achieve low rankings when users are surfing the web. Most users do not even look at the second page of a search so ranking high enough to be included on the first page is vital if you do not wish to miss out on valuable traffic.
A landing page is a web page that is designed for use with your advertising campaign and it is the page that visitors will go to when they respond to an advert, especially synonymous with PPC (or Pay Per Click ads). A landing page may also act as a mini-hub within your website if it is large, but here we’ll restrict ourselves to their use in ad campaigns for traffic generation. Landing pages will hold the information on whatever it is you are selling, including links to buying the product as well as information on the product itself together with any “special offer”.
A cornerstone of SEO work is the identification of keywords and key phrases that will be picked up by the search engines and used to establish the ranking order of your web page. Someone looking for a car may firstly search for “”new models”Ford”, this is a very basic search for research on Ford new models. Later, they may search on “”car dealer” Ford new warranty Focus” which would demonstrate someone who is closer to the buying decision as they are looking at a specific model and a new car – they are actively researching the specifics prior to buying. A buying search will look something like ““Ford dealer” Focus Discounts “Special Offer” Birmingham” – someone is now looking to choose who they are going to buy the car from.
In the mass of searches that are being done by users, common terms will stand out – these are your keywords and key phrases and you need to identify them. You will need to identify especially those keywords that are being used by your own target market – if you’re a Ford dealer in Birmingham say so! Once you’ve done that you can then optimise your landing page for the keywords and you do this broadly in two ways. First by making sure that the landing page coding and design is itself optimised for these keywords and here we’ll introduce some technical terms – the meta tags and headers, in short the web page building blocks – this is referred to as “on-site” SEO and is done by web programmers as part of the web design.
Secondly, there is the “off-site” SEO and this is where your content becomes king together with building good links to the page. In practice, this means using the keywords you have identified within the content of the landing page and hyperlinks in a way that a search engine looking at the page will rank it highly because it appears to be more relevant for that search term. Using our earlier search phrases, the user is definitely looking for a Ford – if you don’t have the word “Ford” on your landing page you aren’t going to be ranked at all! Using keywords and finding differing combinations for them takes time and it is usual to see the keywords and phrases evolve over a campaign period as you gain some understanding of what works and what does not. Bear in mind that the content of the web page (and especially the landing page) needs to be interesting to the human reader and this is not simply about stuffing a keyword into your content so many times that it simply makes no sense when read. How long would you stay on a page that reads “Ford, best deals, Ford, new car, Ford in Birmingham”? Make your content grab your readers and that means interesting, informative, well-written and presented content looking to give them something they can’t get elsewhere.
Building good quality links to the landing page will also get it a higher rank, especially as the search engines perceive that you as the owner cannot directly control the links that are being made to your landing page. If there are good links being made the search engine will think that your landing page is more relevant and rank you even higher on the basis that if some people find your landing page interesting then even more will. Combining the actual links with keywords in what is known as the “anchor text”, the text that you see highlighted when you see a hyperlink on a web page, helps you even more in getting a higher ranking.
This has only been a very cursory introduction to SEO for landing pages and there is a great deal more to be said about them. The key thing to bear in mind is that you need to make the landing page visible and interesting to two viewers, firstly the human user, and that means an offer that grabs them which is where your copywriter figures. Secondly, the landing page must be easily searched by a search engine spider that can see it is relevant to the search terms you are targeting and have good inbound links so it will get a higher ranking and that requires good SEO work.
