The importance of optimising landing pages

I had the pleasure, recently, together with Ann-Maree Morrison of Labels4Kids, of being involved in a Making Money on the Internet workshop entitled Labels, Links & Lolly run by FEAT (Falkirk Enterprise Action Trust).

Ann-Maree gave an outline of her company’s history and experience of setting up a sucessful online ecommerce business. Over the last 4 years she has built the business up from nothing to turnover in excess of £180,000.

She gave an outline of the many areas to be considered in relation to finding, getting and converting visitors into customers convering both SEO and WSO (web site optimisation).

Search Optimisation

My task was to look at the technical implications from an Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) perspective highlighting the on-page and off-page elements that contribute in helping achieve higher search engine page positions in Google, Yahoo, MSN etc and other search engines.

Given the spread of the subject together with the time constraint it was necessarily an overview rather than in-depth presentation.

Effective Landing Pages

But, one of the areas discussed, briefly, was the importance of creating effective landing pages (the pages visitors first land on after clicking on a search result). Landing pages need not only be your home page but could be any page the search engines have indexed.

It is opportune then that over the last couple of weeks on the Google Website Optimizer blog a recognised expert in the field of landing page optimization has had a 3-part series on the subject (see below).

Squeeze every ounce of value

It has always been important to ensure that each and every page of your site works as hard as every other in squeezing every ounce of value out of each visit.

In today’s economic climate it perhaps is even more important and critical!

The posts are not over-long or over-technical and confirms and expands on some of the points I was able to highlight during the presentation. Hope you find them informative and of interest too.

Writing for Conversion – Part 1 – Structure
Writing for Conversion – Part 2 – Tone
Writing for Conversion – Part 3 – Format