Well optimized & effective landing pages are designed with a very focused goal–to generate and convert targeted PPC and organic search traffic.

A landing pages is one that is designed specifically to appeal to a targeted segment of your website visitors. Target segments may be unique search keywords, marketing campaigns, PPC Campaigns or specific webpages/websites from which visitors arrive.

A landing page the first page that a visitor arrives to when coming to a website.

If a visitor had performed a keword search in Google and clicked on an organic result, that person would have “landed” on either your home page or an interior page on your site. If a visitor had performed a search and clicked on your PPC ad, that link would have taken the visitor a specific page on your site. If it was a banner ad that a visitor clicked on that brought them to your site, then the banner ad brought them to a specific landing page on your site.

Find the right keywords for your landing pages with Try It!

So, There are Several Types of Landing Page?

As with so many things dealing with SEO, the correct answer depends on one’s perspective and level of knowledge on the subject. It can generally be said though, that landing pages may differ based on where and how traffic coming to them is generated.

Landing pages designed strictly to convert visitors from places other than natural search engine results (i.e. from PPC, banner ads, email marketing campaigns) don’t have to deal with techniques that help them rank better, such as “optimized copywriting” or backlink anchor text. Nor do they have to worry about factors that typically make ranking more difficult, i.e. lack of indexation or the extensive use of Flash on the page or JavaScript navigation (two programming languages that the Bots don’t yet parse well and thus don’t place any ranking importance on). These types of landing pages are typically created with a relatively small portion the marketing budget, while the larger portion of the budget is used to buy the “clicks” or the traffic coming to the page from elsewhere. It should be noted however, that for PPC marketing in Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, there is importance on how relevant on-page content is to the keywords being bid upon and the PPC ad copy. The more relevant these three things are to each other, the lower your cost per click is when compared to other advertisers bidding against you. This means that your landing pages should be well thought out as far as the content they contain–not just conversion effectiveness.

The other kind of landing page is designed to rank well in the search engines for your keywords and to obtain high conversion rates–if not to actually get the visitor to buy, then to move that visitor on to a page that will. To be successful, this type of landing page must distinguish itself from competitors by out-ranking them in the search engines for target keywords and it must be efficient at motivating visitors to take further action, once they arrive at the page. For this type of landing page, a substantial portion of your online marketing budget may be spent in the page development and, especially, the optimization of this type of landing page. Once complete however, it is a self sustaining, traffic producing, and traffic converting mechanism that may require little or no additional expense for continued high rankings, traffic, and visitor conversions well into the future.

With Landing Pages, the Visitor is ALWAYS Right

High conversion rates requires landing page design that appeals explicitly to those who land on them. If the visitor leaves immediately after arriving to your site, there is a good reason for that and you must figure out what that reason is and correct it. If the visitor leaves your site with a full shopping cart and never comes back to buy, there is a good reason for that too. You, as the website owner, that reason must be understood and dealt with appropriately.

How is this accomplished? Choose your audience by first choosing your keywords–and then building your optimization, text links, PPC or email marketing campaign around those keywords. The content of the landing page is then tailored to deliver a compelling message to that very, very targeted keyword audience. That is a key ingredient to higher conversions.

For example, you likely came to this page by searching in the engines for a keyword that included “landing page”. However, you may also be interested in knowing about keyword services for your landing page. This, like all good landing pages, is designed to rank well for the content the consumer is looking for and to present options that lead the visitor in a desired direction.

Landing Page Testing

Being experienced with web design, what does it take to gut an existing page, position new text within it, add graphics, revise some navigation links and save it to the server as a new page?  OK, now lets say you were going to test five variations of the page to see which one converts best—we’re probably talking about only a few hours of work total, on the design side. The point is, multivariate testing or A/B testing adds a bit of time and cost to the process but refining the most effective copy and layout for your visitors means you are going to convert better and pay for that time with increased sales.

Landing Page Optimization

Those landing pages you want to rank for their target keyword–they’ve got to be optimized. The more resources put into optimizing them, the better they’ll rank and the more traffic you’ll receive with them.

You can search engine optimize a landing page yourself if you’re creative and strong analytically or you have many months to spend on trial and error. Remember that a successful optimization hinges choosing the right keywords, on optimzed meta tags, and on using copy that fully supports them. You may instead choose to make use of our optimizer’s knowledge, experience, time, and resources for a quicker turnaround on your ROI.

Start Your Project Early

Ball park six to nine months for your project if the landing page is designed for organic search engine traffic. While it will generally take less than a month to get your page designed and create content for it, the entire optimization process can take six months or more depending on the competitiveness of the keywords you’re targeting, the age of your site, its backlinks and its overall strength. Now, almost certainly, you’ll start getting traffic well before the six month mark but traffic flow takes some time to hit full stride and differs for each search engine. So, if your landing page is time- or season-sensitive, keep these time frames in mind and plan accordingly.

Track Success

Measuring the effectiveness of your landing page and your ROI is done automatically with real-time web stats and analysis software. Your stats clearly graph traffic volume of your landing pages, their conversion rates, and can even calculate the profitability of each of your pages.

The price of a Good Landing Page

What would you charge for your time if someone called and asked you to use your web design experience for three to five hours of work? Add that to another five to ten hours of SEO work (including testing and analysis) for a page designed to rank highly in the search engines and you have a good idea of the total time involved. If the landing page is being designed for PPC or other web marketing (i.e. not required to rank in the search engines) you’ll nee only an hour or two of your time.

So, using a figure somewhere between $200 and $500 per hour for the collaborative efforts of experienced designers and experienced optimizers, your page is likely to cost you between $500, on the low end,  and $15,000 on the high end. You should expect all the bells and whistles–and then some–for a $15,000 landing page (and done correctly, in a competitive market, it would be very well worth every penny).

“Considering the increased profitability they provide, well designed landing pages are a valuable investment for almost every website.”

Enjoy Long Term Revenue

Well written landing pages tend to bring in more daily visitors to you site as they get older and as you build more marketing around them. For many sites, their landing pages are effective for years. Yet, adopting a strategy of adding additional landing pages on a regular basis is a smart, effective way to reach and convert more visitors on an everyday basis.

URLs

Changing a URL without implementing a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one will wreak havoc on your rankings.

Content

The changing of content on individual pages can have a big impact.  Even if you don’t change the wording, the CMS may place content elements in different locations within the HTML, causing search engines to understand the importance of some aspects of your content differently from the old page to the new page.

Internal Linking

Changes in how internal linking between pages is accomplished can have a huge impact on rankings for your pages. External backlinks to a page aren’t the only thing that help a page rank well–backlinks to a page from within the same site also count.  Remember, when you are looking at a web page’s HTML, only the first link to a specific page from that HTML can count as a ranking factor. If, in your redesign, you move to or add JS, image, or flash links, you can adversely impact rankings.

Duplicate Content Due To URLs Created By CMS Or Ecommerce Platform

You may also find, due to the way your CMS creates URLs, that you end up with duplicate content issues on the new site that you didn’t have on your previous site. Duplicate content is the exact (or mostly exact) same content found on different URLs and it is typically a negative when it comes to SEO.

Navigation

Changes to primary and secondary navigation can have a huge impact if not looked at closely from an SEO perspective. Will the new site be using CSS, JS, images, or flash?  What was the old site using?

So, there you have it.  For several reasons, changing CMS’s can have a big impact on your site’s rankings and Joomla CMS fresh out of the box (un-tweaked and un-refined by you or your SEO) is not going to deal with these issues as well as you hope.

All of that is the long way of saying that the fastest and easiest way to change your snippet is for your or your web designer to change your meta description tag. The meta description tag should stay within 250 characters, should broadly describe the theme of the page, and should incorporate your target keywords (as opposed to the page’s title tag, which should stay withing 80 characters and should concisely state the thrust of the page as well as incorporate your keywords).

In the description tag, you can put your company name near the beginning if you choose to and it should show up in your snippet–that way, you don’t have to use up any of your 80 characters in the title with your company name.

Cheap Hotels in South Beach

Before arrival, be sure to get a handle on the difference between “South Beach” and “Miami Beach” – if you don’t already.  Many people use these two terms interchangeably but they’re not really synonyms, at all. “South Beach” (a.k.a., SoBe) is effectively a district within the city of Miami Beach and “Miami Beach” is one of several cities on the long, quasi-man-made barrier island group that is situated just off of the coast of the city of Miami and its suburbs. Those islands also separate the northern part of the Biscayne from the Atlantic Ocean.

The area of South Beach is approximately one single square mile. Its southern edge is defined by Government Cut, the shipping channel used by freighters, Carnival Cruise Lines and a seemingly never ending variety of fishing boats and sailboats entering and leaving Biscayne Bay. Depending on who you speak to, South Beach extends to the north up to about 24^th St. or about where the Ocean Dr. / Collins Ave. Historic District ends and to the west over to Alton Rd. Of course, to the east is the beach, the Gulf Stream, and the Atlantic Ocean.

View Miami Beach in a larger map
So there you have it.  One square mile that includes the largest 20^th century historic district in the country, with more than 800 protected art deco style houses, boutique hotels, and buildings, the southeastern most strip of beach on the continental U.S., one of the great vacation destinations in all the world.

Ready to Make Hotel Reservations?

With it being such an international destination and with it having such a reputation for lavishness, it might be hard to believe that you can actually find cheap deals on hotel rooms in South Beach.  But it is true.  While the area does have its share of four and five star hotels (the Fontainebleau Miami Beach,  Loews Miami Beach Hotel,  Grand Beach Hotel,  Royal Palm South Beach Resort, for example)  a vast majority of the hotels within walking distance to the beach are relatively inexpensive boutique hotels that provide a marvelous South Beach experience without charging an arm and a leg.   In fact, situated just off of Lummus Park, right between Collins Avenue and Ocean Drive, there are dozens hotels we’ve arranged inexpensive hotel deals with. Check out our cheap hotel prices for the dates you’re in South Beach.

The 5 block strip of beach just to the south of Lummus Park (the Lummus Brothers, along with Carl Fisher and John Collins, were the founders of Miami Beach back in 19151) is probably the most popular.  Maybe just because it’s the southernmost strip of beach, maybe it’s got the coolest lifeguard huts, maybe it’s the availability of cheap hotels, maybe it’s the continual fashion shoots and modeling that take place here, maybe it’s the surfers that flock to this spot when the surf is right—but for whatever reason, it rocks.  Once you’ve checked into your hotel and you are ready to get out to the beach, this might be the first area you want to try.

Use Us to Find a Hotel that Fits Your Budget

As you follow the beach north of Lummus Park you reach Lincoln Rd. and he northern half of South Beach.  (If you take a left here and follow Lincoln Rd. two blocks, you come to Lincoln Rd. Mall and some of the best shopping on the island.). The beach up to the north is lined by some of the more expensive hotels in South Beach–the Ritz Carlton and Loews, for example, but there are still plenty of great places to stay on a budget.  We have been able to arrange some cheap rates at some of these luxury spots, but often, the smaller, art deco style hotels provide a better South Beach flavor for a lot less money.

Well, that should give you enough information to get you started on your trip to South Beach. Explore and enjoy the sun. Please check out our cheap hotel rates and we hope you enjoy your stay

Knowing that, (and taking for granted that you’re already familiar with keyword research)  focus on one or two keywords or a single keyphrase per page and use that keyword/keyphrase near the beginning of your title.  Also use your keywords/keyphrase in several locations in the text of the page including in an h1 heading and once or twice in each of the first few paragraphs.

limit your title tag to 85 characters or less

limit your title tag of each page to include only the keyword/keyphrase, one or two geographic placenames, and the company name (use the company name at the end of the title).

Balancing all of the above factors and still keeping your page title under 85 characters (including spaces) is what will set you apart from your competitors.

Your meta description tag shouldn’t be longer than 200 or so characters and using a properly constructed sentence or two, it should broadly describe the theme of the page, it should employ your keywords, some keyword variations, thematically relevant terminology, and perhaps, even a call to action.  Your meta description makes up a substantive portion (if not the entire portion) of the snippit of info that lies below your link in a page’s listing the search engine results page.

If your site is a year old or less,  it is still very young compared to most of your competitors.  While your site is maturing, work on some of your social media profiles like yelp, merchant circle, kaboodle, twitter, linkedIn, and Facebook.  Develop those profiles fully, get yourself well-versed in how to make full use of those platforms, and use those sites as a means of networking and very gentle marketing.

When you’ve finished with the most important parts of your on-page optimization and in between working on your social media profiles, do this search on Yahoo: link:www.domain.com (replace “domain.com” with individual domain names of competitors that show up in Google’s results for your target keyword searches).  The results of those link:www.domain.com searches will show you what websites are linking to your that competitor.  While many of those links will be worth little or nothing, some of them will have value–a rough guide is simply does the page that contains the link have any pagerank at all–and if it does, see if that site will include a link to your site as well.  (The whole link building topic is too complex to be discussed in any detail here, but call us at Metapilot if you want more help in that area).  Besides sites with some page rank, focus on ones that are local to your location.

Since all your traffic won’t come directly from the algorithmic search results, on’t forget to get your site included in the local business/local search/maps feature that Google, Yahoo, and Bing provide.  Make sure you get your site listed in those places and to help you show up near the top of those local listings, make sure you submit your site to these places: yellowpages.com, superpages.com, citysearch.com, local.com, and infospace.com.

The Page Just Isn’t Being Crawled That Often
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is an old version of your page (You can tell by doing a search that usually brings up the individual page in question as a result and then clicking on the “Cached” link at the end of your snippet–the page that then shows is going to be the version of your page that the search engine saw the last time it crawled your site, aka, the cached page.), and the snippet is from an old version of your page, it is most likely that the page has simply not been crawled by the search engine since the new version of the page replaced the old one. When the search engines do crawl the new one, the snippet will likely change (if you’ve revised the text on the page and/or the page title and meta description) and the cached version of the page will be updated.

Stuck With a Yahoo Directory or DMOZ Snippet
If the search engine’s cached version of the page is a new version of your page but the snippet and the link don’t look anything like the new page’s title and meta description then, in most cases, your snippet is being pulled from either the your site’s listing in the Yahoo directory or the DMOZ directory. This occurrence is seen less often than it once was but we still see it here at Metapilot from time to time. If that is the case, first go to the Yahoo Directory and search for your business name and domain name (minus the www) and see if your business comes up as a result. If it does, edit or have your web designer edit your site’s homepage by adding this meta tag below your description meta tag: . If not, go to the DMOZ directory and search for your business name and domain name to see if your site comes up as a result for one of those searches. If so, edit your homepage’s html by adding this meta tag beneath your meta description tag: . Once you’ve added one or both of these meta tags it can take a week or two to a month or two for your snippet to be corrected.

Redirects
Other reasons for the search engine snippet to be out of sync with what you may consider to be the current version of the page, such as domain masking or meta refreshes are beyond the scope of this post but contact me if the other fixes didn’t work and you need to look at other options.

Regardless of which fix you need, it is the time it takes for the search engine to return to your site to see the revised data that will determine how long it will take for the fix to become evident in the search results. I’d say the average time between crawls for a typical site with a small number of links is between one to three months. That amount of time is influenced by you website’s popularity and authority (i.e., how many other websites are linking to your pages within your site and how important do the search engines think those pages that link to you are. More links from sites that are of greater importance will mean that your site gets crawled more often.

If a website has zero links to it from other sites, search engines can only recognize its existence if you submit the site to them via their site submittal interface. But, if there is a single link pointing to the site, search engines will find it and crawl it. Once the site (or page) is crawled it will be cued up for another crawl with the interval based on how how many worthwhile links point to the site/page. Continueing to submit the page will not increase that interval.

That being said, if your site has a small number of links pointing to it from web pages of little or no value (according to the search engines) then it may be a long, long time before spiders reach your site via those links. This is because the value a page has in a search engine (we’re talking mainly Google, here) is a major factor in how often the search engine returns to that page to see if anything new has appeared on it. A site of zero value may get crawled as little as a few times a year (if that) and if the only link to your website is on such a page, Google just isn’t going to know about your link until the next time it gets back to crawl that page.