Landing Pages and Search Engine Optimization
One strategy that works quite well on the net is buying literal domains and building landing pages on them. A literal domain is one that has the keywords that someone might be searching for. Utilizing keywords in the domain and a targeted landing page for those terms is an effective way to drive traffic to your business.
An example is this luggage scales website built by friend and ecommerce optimization expert James Paden. Rather than utilizing the product name or the business name, the site is simply “luggage scales” – directly matching what search engine users are entering (and a #2 position on the search engine results page!).
I’ve decided to put this theory into action and build my own landing page for blogging for SEO.
Elements of the Landing Page:
- The title of the page as well as the heading (h1 tag) have Blogging for SEO in them.
- I’m utilizing a Google Voice widget. This allows visitors to call me directly but I don’t need to publicly display my phone number on the site. It’s an important call to action for the visitor – highly visible and above the ‘fold’ (they don’t need to scroll down).
- I’ve branded the page to let the visitor know that there’s a company under the scenes and that it’s not simply a spam site.
- Utilizing a jQuery carousel to spruce up the page and provide some decorative, eye-catching images. On each of the sliding images, I’m also careful to include descriptive alternative text and titles.
- I ask a common question that is relevant to the visitor and then supply a bulleted list (easy to read) with responses.
- I provide additional details on the services that I can extend to a company.
- I provide a very bold call to action that’s impossible to ignore!
- Embedded in the page is a server-side aggregator to publish the Marketing Technology Blog Feed from my blog to the page. I run the feed through Yahoo! Pipes to filter out my Daily Links posts. This not only publicizes my blog, it also keeps the page content changing each time that search engines crawl it – with relevant content.
- I close with an embedded link to open the contact form. The form is built with Formspring and the popup utilizes another jQuery plugin, Facebox.
I also registered the site with Google Webmasters, built a robots.txt file, a sitemap.xml file, and added Google Analytics to monitor the page.
Once I see the keywords that are attracting traffic to the page – as well as measuring the responses for the page, I’ll continue to tweak the wording and the calls-to-action until I feel like I’ve maximized the results.
