Bharat S. M. Karavadra

Develop Landing Pages for Your Site: They work!

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

I suggested to a client to develop landing pages for their main site to help bring in more visitors.

Even though I had never created landing pages for a client, I had read about them and that they did help bring in more visitors to sites.

Once the client agreed, I thought about how search engines work and how best to develop landing pages for the main Garage Door Parts site.

I eventually created a few websites using different domain names instead of landing pages within the same domain. I did this because I know that some of the search engines actually take into consideration the actual domain name when calculating the ranking of the result that appear when you do a search.

Once the landing pages were developed, I added Google analytics to each of the landing pages sites so that I could find out how they performed.

On looking at the statistics on writing this Post (about 6 months after developing the landing page sites), I have seen that the main site got about 20% of the visitors from the landing page sites in the last month.

So I would recommend developing landing pages and or landing page sites, especially if you have to perform in a competitive marketplace and know that very specific products or services that you want to promote can be catered for for at least 6 months to a year. Why this timescale? Because it takes a while to get new domains and content registered with the search engines, and if you constantly change the service or product, or the product is in low quantity, then by the time you have been registered successfully you may not be able to service the requirements.

What are landing pages or sites?
Landing pages are single web pages usually on the same domain as the main site (e.g. www.site.com/landing.page.htm) but they can be on another domain.

Landing sites can be one or more pages on the same domain as the main site (e.g.  www.site.com/pages/landing.home.page.htm, www.site.com/pages/landing.page.1.html, etc) or on another domain (e.g. www.landing.site.com, www.landing.site.com/landing.page.1.html, www.landingsite.com/landing.page.1.html

Each page on landing sites should be linked to each other, otherwise search engines may not find the unlinked pages from the main landing home page.

Choosing an appropriate domain for a landing page or site.
Landing pages or sites can be created for search engines or specific marketing activities (e.g. the push of a single product from your whole product range). I am here talking about catering specifically for search engines.

Both the domain name and pages (see below) need to be named appropriately.

Taking my client’s site as a real example, the main domain is www.ukgaragedoorsparts.co.uk and we have chosen (amongst others) the following 2 domain names for landing sites:

1. www.garagedoorhandle.co.uk
   The main site’s products has a category of garage door handle products and hence this domain specifically caters for searches related to garage doors handles and the landing site itself has content and search engine coding appropriate for a search for these products.
2. www.garage-door-spares.net
   This domain was chosen after doing some research which showed that people used the word ”spares” as well as “parts” to find the appropriate items on the main site. Again this landing site has appropriate content and coding for search engines.

Page naming.
As with the domain name which should include the keywords for which you are creating the landing site, each page of the landing site should also be named appropriately.

For example, if you are selling a product then the domain name would be something like product.com and then you could have a second page on the landing site called ”buy” or “shop” like this product.com/buy.html or product.com/shop.html. That way if someone did a search for “buy product” or “product shop” the ranking of your site and pages would be higher as they contain the keywords that are being searched for.

Search engine registration.
As obvious as it may seem the landing pages or sites need to be submitted to the major search engines and if other pages within landing sites are linked from the home page of the landing site then only the home page need be submitted, otherwise single page will need to be submitted.

I tend to submit to Google, Yahoo and Live, as I have found that these are the most used search engines and other search engine spiders seem to follow automatically at some point.

Note: It can take weeks or even longer to get registered so I advise quickly creating an appropriate home page for the landing site and submitting this and then create the final landing pages or site which should automatically get updated and this updating seems to be a quicker process than the initial registration.

Verson 2 updated 27th August 2008