Today’s SEO school bus lesson is centered around some of the basics for landing pages. Lets take the SEO school bus approach, and let me know if you have anything to add to some of my suggestions.
Your sites landing page will decide if a visitor comes and goes in a moment, or stays and digs deeper into the site. Lets face it, we have to catch peoples attention within the first few seconds of them visiting our site. We’re competing with a fast paced world of massive stimuli, from the MTV reality shows to Flavor Flav’s dating show (not familiar with either, don’t worry). Now the seo school bus is not suggesting you start your own reality show, starring you, directed by you, and written by you. Lets take this like it’s your first time working on a landing page.
Your landing page is the place someone “lands” after clicking on your website. This could be because you have your link on your friends blog for share organic dog biscuit recipes, or you’ve started a pay-per-click ad campaign . Maybe you’re on the first page of the big G and someone finds your organic-dog-biscuit-recipes.com website. If you found the SEO school bus somewhere other than from the search engines, then you may have landed somewhere on my website, and it might not have been the home page. This means every page and post can be a potential landing page.
Lets take the organic-dog-biscuit-recipes.com website example; this outline will apply for all the pages on your site.
1. Call to action
Unless your website is a one page profile of your dog buddy, and that’s all you wanted, you’re going to want to call your visitors to action. This could be subscribing to the rss feed, or buying your book on easy bake organic dog biscuits. The call to action should be available for your visitor without them having to go looking for it. Whats the SEO school bus’ call to action? Well it depends on the landing page, will always be the answer. If your an aspiring author blogging about your new book that you just published, then perhaps the call to action would be to buy the book. If you have a program you developed that helps people find their local oil shop, then the call to action might be to download the program.
2. Page Titles
All of your landing pages have to have their very own title page (look around the SEO school bus for examples). They need to be unique from one another, and relevant to what the page is about. This is where you want to make sure you include your keyword(s) into the title. If your page is about a new jalapeno dog biscuit recipe you just came up with then your title should look something like “New jalapeno dog biscuit recipe”. An example of what not to do would be, “Find out what you can make for your dog buddy that he would love!”. While your dog may love the new treats, the search engines won’t. In some cases websites will have other pages out ranking their home page for a keyword, because they’ve made a great landing page.
3. Meta descriptions
A lot like the last one. Just keep it simple here, make sure your keywords are in there, but don’t feel like you have to lose your creativity. Always remember the content our website have are for humans too, not just the robots.
4. Headlines
We’re probably not all journalists, but we can learn something from they way they write their headlines. Open up a news paper and see what catches your eye. I’m not here to teach you creative writing, but this is something you can get better with over time. You may have a hit and miss experience at first, but you’ll learn how to make more hits than misses. Make sure your code for this has the <H1> for your headline, this will tell the search engines “look here this is what this page is about”. H1 header tags should be added into your page with the <h1> “SEO School Bus” </h1>. Make sure your headline can deliver on its promise. Don’t say, “How to cure the common cold.” if your just selling vitamin C pills.
5. Internal links
Internal linking is a way I can point to other pages on the SEO School Bus. This is done with the <a href=”mywebpage.com”>My Web Page</a>. Again with this don’t ever do it, lets try a good and bad example again. If you are describing a how to set up your own make money online website, and you already covered what a niche market is, you wouldn’t want to say, “Click HERE!! to find out what a niche market is”. The search engines now think the link is about HERE!! Try this, “If you missed what a niche market is…” Much better, now they know it’s about niche marketing. If you have 30 different links to go to, it will be spammy and no one will read what you’ve written on that page.
Aside from the example website I picked, I hope the SEO school bus has taken you on an educational ride today.
