Landing Pages… convert the curious into the customer

A well crafted landing page should be focused and created to target your audience, and potential customers, for your business. It should be clean and uncluttered, easy to navigate, promote a concise message about the product or service your business offers and provides a clear CTA (Call To Action), a means (button or link) to prompt the viewer to follow a path (or convert) to a sale. The goal is to have a high conversion rate by prompting the curious, potential visitor to your page to register their information (to generate leads) or convert them into a buying customer.  But first you have to direct the curious to your landing page.

The landing page is reached though an existing link, often in an advertisement, or by way of an online search. You can boost the accuracy of that search for your business by implementing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques. These can easily be built into your site and landing page during it's construction and can play an important role in placing your site before competitors in search results.

Google, a leader in online search, offers suggestions to assist in landing page optimization. Search data is collected by way of "web crawlers" (or bots) that search the Internet to gather site data. You can assist the search bots and help push your landing page to the top of search results by following some simple page creation rules:

• creation of unique, accurate and descriptive web page titles (HTML <Title> tag)
• using the "description" meta tag in your HTML code (using words relevant to your business)
• short but descriptive page file names or links (URLs - Uniform Resource Locator), using hyphens as separators so bots can recognize the individual words (eg, dress-formal.html - yes; DressFormal.html - no, words not easily searchable)
• make site navigation and the Call To Action easy to find and access

You've help guide potential customers to your landing page through boosting search results, now the structure of the page itself comes into play. The following video provides 8 tips for optimizing your landing page.

Your business wants and needs a high "conversion rate" to be successful. Boosting the search results for your site through SEO techniques and implementing the design tips provided will greatly help convert the "curious browser" into a "buying customer".


References

SEO Starters Guide -
http://www.google.com/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

Learn how Google discovers, crawls, and serves web pages - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70897

Landing Page Optimization - 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_page_optimization

Examples of small business landing pages -
http://unbounce.com/landing-page-examples/8-small-business-landing-pages-critiqued-for-conversion/

What is a landing page -
http://www.vertster.com/landing-page-design/what-is-a-landing-page/

8 Tips video -
http://www.vertster.com/landing-page-design/what-is-a-landing-page/

Search Bot image -
http://seoyourblog.com

Submitted by Pamela Ramos Peraza

Search Engine Optimization

What is Search Engine Optimization?

Basically, Search Engine Optimization, or “SEO” is the process of bringing a website higher in the ranks of a search engine.  When trying to optimize a webpage for search engines, what one is essentially doing is trying to make the site more visible and easy to find for people looking for content related to your subject matter.

How do you improve your rank on Google, Bing, and other search engines?

There are many ways in which you can improve your ranks, but it can be very complex.  So complex, in fact, companies now hire people to work full time on improving their business’ rank.

Two great ways that one can improve their search engine ranks are using the right keywords and having relevant, quality content which will lead to having backlinks.  These are basically what SEO is all about, when looked at in the simplest sense.

Keywords involve choosing relevant words and phrases to base your optimization around.  These will be the basis for your URL, tags, and other words which will be places in the coding of the website, but also in the content.  The more specific and niche the keywords are the better chance someone who is looking for your specific content will be able to find it.  If one uses keywords which are too general or generic your content could be lost among the millions of sites on the internet.

There are sites such as http://www.seotipsy.com/ that serve as tools to give companies ideas and advice for improving their SEO rankings.

Some people believe that the most important thing to ranking high on search engines is to generate relevant content.  I agree with this idea, because it leads to the direct traffic, plus it can lead to people linking others to your website.  When others place a link to your website on another website it is called a backlink, and it is a useful way to get your website ranked higher.

Though SEO is a great way to get your website noticed, it is an ever changing game, and you always have to be working on keeping your rank up.  Your website can drop from the first hit on a search engine to several pages deep in a matter of minutes.  Staying number one is not easy, but it is definitely necessary if you wish to have a successful business with a strong internet presence.

Here is a short video about the basics of SEO: 

I hope you enjoyed my blog, thanks for reading.

Victoria Le Page
October 3, 2012