How to Write Effective Landing Pages

Landing Pages — Their Importance To Your Ad Campaigns
Grab Your Prospect’s Attention & Keep Them On Your Webpage

Landing pages.  Very important web pages for your internet marketing website.  Why?  Because these pages serve as clear and concise pieces of “call to action” information for your website visitors.  Landing pages are responsible for helping your visitor decide to engage an initial conversation with you, so they can investigate a specific product, or service, or free offer, etc. that you are promoting.

It is a proven fact that your website has a large influence over prospective clients and customers in deciding if they want to make the next step and learn more from you.  A landing page is a vehicle that gives specific information on one topic to your prospect.

However, more times than not, most of the internet marketing websites that I have visited or been hired to help improve, have poorly focused landing pages.  The content is written in a manner that causes the visitor to end up either overwhelmed with too much non-specific information, or deciding to leave the website because they couldn’t find what they were hoping to find.

Write A Landing Page That’s Focused And Specific To Only One “Call To Action”

Without an effective landing page for each and every ad campaign you undertake, you’re wasting money and customers.  As examples, whether you’re trying to build up your mailing list by offering a free download or promoting a special “Get to Know Us” discount on your professional services, the bottom line is all the same.  You want positive results.  You want prospects moving forward in their decision making process, not clicking off your internet marketing website.

So, while your ad, special offer, etc. attracts your prospect’s interest, the landing page is supposed to pick up where the ad leaves off.  It should lead the prospect to complete the desired transaction .  The time it will take you to write clear, concise and compelling text for a landing page is an investment in success.  There’s no getting around this fact.

Don’t think that landing pages are only limited to sales pages.  They also include pages designed to get visitors to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter or to leave contact information on a lead generation page.  A/B split-testing can also be employed to determine usability, to refine elements of a home page, or to develop a navigation system that visitors can understand.

Create A Great Landing Page To Capture Your Prospect’s Attention

• Stick to One Theme, One Offer, One Message:  The tendency of most internet marketers is to say “Hey, I got them to my website, why don’t I give them information on all of my different services, or tell them about all the clients I’ve serviced in the past, or I think I ought to create links to all my other web pages,” and on and on …

Your landing page should have one specific action that you want the prospect to take.  To register for an event, complete an information request form, download a whitepaper, etc.  Distracting prospects with other information or additional offers will drastically reduce the number of leads you are able to capture.

• Create a Clear Call to Action:  Do not hide the call to action at the bottom of the page, making the prospect scroll down to get to it.  The action you want them to take should be the main focus of the page.  Create a clickable button beginning with the action word corresponding to what you want them to do – register, contact, download, buy, etc.

Prominently place this button above the fold on the page as well as in various places as they scroll down.   The call to action button should be visible at all times as the prospect scrolls down the page.

• Capture Your Prospect’s Information!  Regardless of the offer, create a response device to capture the prospect’s information.  For instance, if you are offering a free downloadable eBook, also create a short form they must complete before they can proceed with the download.  If the prospect is interested in what you have to offer they will be willing to exchange a small amount of information about themselves.

Additionally, they are pre-qualifying themselves as interested prospects giving you legitimate reason to follow up.  Do not ignore this valuable marketing step.  Depending upon your offer, it might be something as simple as a “Thank You” email with a link that points back to your website.  Or your follow-up might be a once a week for seven weeks email course.  

I use and recommend Get Response for a very affordable and pretty easy to use autoresponder email system that allows anyone to easily capture their prospects information and also set up all different sorts of email campaigns.  A serious internet marketer cannot be without an autoresponder system!

• Match Your Ad Campaign with Your Website Copy: Make sure the look and feel of your landing page is consistent with the marketing piece that drives the prospect to it. If possible, use the same images, design elements, and colors. Repeat the copy and offer. This helps to build credibility, reinforce your message and the benefits, and increase awareness and conversions by reassuring the prospect that they are indeed in the right place.

• Keep Your Prospect on Your Landing Page: Keep navigation and links to a bare minimum if at all possible. Once they’re on your landing page, the last thing you want a prospect to do is click out to another page on your website without completing the desired action.

To help curtail this, simply strip the page of main navigation and keep the amount of links to a minimum. Only links directly relevant to your offer should be included. If you do offer the option of directing them off your landing page, allow the link to open up another browser window. Keep that landing page open!

To give you a very good example of a well written landing page that follows all the criteria I’ve listed here, please go and take a look at one of my landing pages that focuses on an eBook I wrote and am promoting.   I think you’ll see that I do practice what I teach :)  The Hypertufa How-To Manual

Search Engine Optimization Considerations For A Landing Page

As a final note I must touch upon the SEO strategy for a landing page. Simply stated, definitely keep your landing page keyword focused and written with compelling copy. Make your visitors and the spiders happy.

However, there are many times when a landing page is a temporary situation, such as when you are offering “something” for a very short period of time and there would be absolutely no way search engine rankings would materialize in that limited time frame. In this situation, still utilize the targeted keywords throughout your copy and stick to sound content writing principles. Why not? It just makes good sense.

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Internal Linking: Yes! It’s Very Important

Internal Links Are Very Important For SE Spiders & Your Visitors
Learn How To Build A Strong Internal Linking Structure For Your Website

Internal links – hyperlinks that direct your visitor to another page within your website — are a component of search engine optimization.  Are lots of them on every page a “good thing”?  Do they produce more or less weight ranking wise, as compared to external links coming in from other sites?  What words should be included in the internal links?

These are just a few of the internal linking questions I’m asked quite often by my internet marketing clients. So, let me give you some very important SEO information to keep in mind when you’re writing and constructing your web pages.

Internal Links Are An Often Overlooked Aspect Of Search Engine Optimization

They should be integrated into the content WHEN and WHERE it is appropriate and if it makes sense within the content.  Don’t just add links pointing to other pages within your website thinking the search engine spiders are going to report back to headquarters, stating you should rank higher now because you’ve peppered hyperlinks all over the place!

No!  That is not how it works.  What those hungry little spiders AND your information hungry visitors are looking for are well written, content-rich pages.  If an internal link (or links) is needed and is relevant, then those internal links are an asset to your site.

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So again, yes you should definitely maximize the internal linking on all your pages, but ONLY if it is appropriate to do so.  If it helps the search engines to index your site, and also helps people easily navigate their way around … then you’re good to go!

Strong Internal Linking With Targeted Keyword Anchor Text Will Help An Interior Page Rank Better For The Chosen Target Phrase(s)

A page with no other pages linking to it doesn’t carry much ranking weight.  This is plain and simple SEO fact.  Another issue concerning indexing and ranking issues pertaining to internal links is this: it really depends on the search engine.  They are all very secretive about exactly how much internal link text assists in their ranking algorithms.

In general, it seems to be safe to assume that an internal link will be closely associated with the page it links to in one or more ways, unless the search engine decides not to trust the link.  It’s also safe to assume that every time you compose a new web page, you ought to do your best to place at least one internal link pointing to another one of your web pages.

Don’t Waste The Ranking Power Of Your Internal Links!  Use Your Targeted Keywords For The Anchor Text … NOT The Words “Click Here”

When it comes to these important hyperlinks, probably the biggest mistake I continually come across when doing my research to compile an SEO Website Analysis Report for a client, is that they use the words “click here” in the anchor text for the links.

What a waste of valuable ranking-real-estate!  Use the targeted keyword(s) that pertain to the content in the page that the internal hyperlink points to!

As an example … if I wanted to point your attention back to my blog page about the top three things I suggest you do at the very minimum to make sure each page is optimized, I could provide a hyperlink like this:  Top Three SEO Tips for Your Internet Marketing Website.  I’ve incorporated two main keyword phrases — “SEO” and “Internet Marketing”.  Though this hyperlink is a bit lengthy in the words used, I do believe you get the idea.

Notice what I accomplished two paragraphs above?  Though it is an external link to a web page found on my www.SEO-Innovation.com website, pretend for now (for sake of this article) that it is an internal link.  It makes sense to put that link there within the context of the paragraph.  For the anchor text, I made sure to include the keyword “SEO” along with “Website Analysis Report” which certainly let’s you know what information I am pointing you to.

Effective search engine optimization has many facets, and a solid internal linking structure is one important component.  Remember:  link naturally — link to a page when you refer to it in the text and because you wish to direct your visitor in that direction.

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