Do Landing Pages work for Search Engine Marketing?

Do Landing Pages work or are they an effort in futility when it comes to Search Engine Marketing? The quick answer…it depends.

This article examines the key components of a Search Engine Landing Pages and how you can successfully design and utilize these tools to increase search engine marketing.

We also discuss the pros and cons of Search Engine Landing Pages and what most people do incorrectly when implementing a landing page strategy.

What is a Search Engine Landing Page?
The 10-second explanation is as follows - a search engine landing page is a web page, other than your homepage, that is designed with the goal of achieving high search engine rankings.

Why Use Search Engine Landing Pages?
You should look at a search engine landing page as a secondary or tertiary homepage. Maybe your website focuses on “Office Telecommunications” in general. Let’s assume your business is located in San Diego. So now the search phrase “San Diego Office Telecommunications” is a valuable search phrase to you.

You might not necessarily want to reconfigure your homepage to focus solely on “San Diego Office Telecommunications,: but you would like your site to pop high with that search phrase.

Here’s where a landing page can work like a charm.

You keep your homepage optimized for “Office Telecommunications” and you add a few pages geared towards “San Diego Office Telecommunications”. Sounds really simple, but there are a lot of factors to consider.

What People do Wrong
A search engine landing page truly needs to be a “second homepage” within your site. We see a lot of search engine landing pages that either redirect via a refresh, or only offer links to the main site’s homepage. Either way, launching a search engine landing page that is nothing more than a redirect or a shell of a redirect is the kiss of death with search engines.

Register your Landing Pages
We take the step of registering individual landing pages with search engines. This helps ensure that the pages are indexed and that they can be found by the search engines. Likewise, you want to make sure that your landing pages are sufficiently linked from other pages so that the search engines recognize your landing pages when they crawl your site. And, if you’re using Google Sitemaps of Yahoo Site Explore be sure to add the landing pages to your sitemap files.

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Article by Greg Banig Design & Marketing, http://www.gregbanigdesign.com.