How to Optimize Your Landing Page
If you do a search in Google for “search engine optimization”, “seo” or any similar term you will find countless outdated articles that promote practices that are not very useful these days – i.e. website submissions, link exchanges, altering meta keyword tags, etc.
These seemingly useful tactics do very little for the ultimate goal of an effective SEO campaign—to drive meaningful traffic. Because search engines have changed significantly in the last ten years, many of these outdated practices are no longer necessary; while some, like the massive link exchanges are actually considered search engine “spam”.
So if these techniques are not the way to higher search rankings, what are we left with?
Focus on Qualified Visitors
First, you need to think about SEO in terms of specific goals. Think of SEO as anything and everything you can do to your website or landing page to improve the number of qualified visitors who are attracted to it from search engines. In order to attract these qualified visitors, you should strive to achieve the following 3 goals:
Goal # 1 The most critical is increasing your site’s visibility. Before a user can find a website on a search engine, the search engine must find that site first! What’s more, the search engine must also deem the site important (i.e. worthy of having a high place in the index). At the moment, the major search engines rely primarily on a site’s incoming links. If many large sites link to your content, Google will assume your content is at least somewhat useful. To increase your site’s visibility you must work on building quality incoming links.
Goal # 2 - The second goal is targeting. If you want to get more qualified visitors to your website, you must understand which keywords are bringing you the right visitors—visitors that are likely to take action on your site (subscribe to a newsletter, buy something, etc.) A lot of people who are new to SEO or the Web just want a lot of traffic — but traffic alone will not guarantee success. What you want is the right kind of traffic, the traffic that will take action on your site. Targeting the right keywords is the best way to accomplish this.
Goal # 3 - The final goal that you should pursue is what I like to call the site’s presence. This involves getting as many pages as possible indexed, especially the ones that are most important to your overall goals. If your content isn’t getting listed then people aren’t going to be finding the most relevant content that you’ve created.
Three Simple Steps to Successful SEO
SEO is not simply about ranking #1 for a random keyword. Many people will tell you that, but they are missing the point. The purpose of effective SEO is getting as much traffic for qualified keywords.
When the right visitors are coming to your site and taking action on your content, then you know you’ve accomplished successful SEO. But how do you achieve this? My strategy has 3 distinct steps:
1. Research – Try to understand where your site is right now. Are you targeting the right keywords? What’s your market? Are you missing any keyword opportunities? What are your competitors doing? Understanding what successful competitors are doing lets you learn and apply their strategies to your own site.
2. Create/Promote – The next step is to create an SEO plan that will get you where you need to be. This usually involves creating or reconfiguring content to attract the right type of user with qualified keywords. Just as important, you need to promote your content so that users can find it. There are a lot of tactics to do SEO properly, but here are some basics, many of which I’ve previously discussed in my SEO blog.
- Keyword research
- SEO copywriting
- Social media marketing
- Link building and baiting
- Blogging
- Creating and submitting XML sitemaps
- Duplicate content
- URL rewriting and redirects
3. Track progress – The final step, and this is one that people often forget, is tracking your progress! How far are you from your specific goals? Periodically checking in will help you understand where you are so that you can learn what worked and what didn’t, as well as those areas that you still have to work on.
It is important to understand that you need to complement your affiliate landing pages with useful content. It is very hard to attract visitors and links to pages that are only sales pitches. Use content pages as pre-selling tools that lead to the affiliate offers. The content pages should be the ones you are trying to optimize.
This is my first post on this blog and I am not sure how educated readers are on SEO. I hope this has been useful! Please feel free to sound off in the comments.
21 Comments, Comment or Ping
Neal "thePuck" Jansons
Great post. One of the things i find so annoying about the burgeoning SEO/SEM biz is not only how many pieces of misinformation are out there, but how people are even selling e-books telling how to do it wrong!
Your point about qualified/targeted leads is also important to remember. People in SEO/SEM talk about the Long Tail but don’t get the more abstract principle through their heads…Long Tail niching is more than just getting ranked for a particular set off keywords, it’s also about niching the content of your site to attract real leads, people who so specifically want what you have they are almost sure to buy.
Sphunn.
Sep 25th, 2008
Hamlet Batista
Thanks, Neal.
You hit the nail on the head. The sad truth is that most people giving SEO advice are more interested in impressing people than in the actual bottom line results you could get if you follow their teachings.
Sep 25th, 2008
peter bordes
Hamlet
does the same targeting work across all search engines. or are you mainly doing SEO for Google and then using that to set the targeting for all other engines? are key phrases as effective as keywords in getting the targeted traffic or is there a ratio of one to another that works best?
With blog type pages can widgets or store fronts be a part of their SEO strategy? What tools do you recommend?
Sep 27th, 2008
John Gohde
Tracking your progress is very important. Your post gave me a lot of good ideas to work on.
Sep 28th, 2008
Hamlet Batista
Each search engine is different. I prefer to start with Google because it accounts for most of the traffic, but if I manage to rank first in Yahoo I try to improve those rankings first.
I assume you are talking about one vs multiple words phrases. Single word keywords are usually generic terms (except for brands) and multiple word phrases are usually more specific and can have higher conversion rates. Generic terms can send more traffic but are also more competitive. My plan is to always start with the low hanging fruits.
Widgets and store fronts are an excellent way to monetize the traffic to a blog. Viral widgets are an excellent way to improve your SEO results.
If you are starting our (not making money yet), I recommend that you use many of the free tools because at this stage you have more time than money. Once you start making money and getting confident with your marketing skills, I recommend you try some of the time saving tools such as our SEO suite RankSense
Sep 28th, 2008
Contempt
Very good article. I have a question for you though since you mentioned it a little bit.
I have a theory that HTML sitemaps carry a little more weight in terms of inward linking & link power than XML sitemaps due to the fact that it’s valued as a where you can focus on the alt’s rather than a direct link that just says “this is a page” - in other words, titles, etc.
What’s your take on that?
Sep 28th, 2008
Hamlet Batista
Thanks, Contempt. You are right for the single fact that XML sitemaps are not about inbound/outbound linking or link power. XML sitemaps are used to help you get more of your pages indexed. Search engines can indexed any page listed in an XML sitemap but not so for pages/links listed on HTML sitemaps. HTML sitemaps look like any other page to a search engine robot.
Sep 28th, 2008
Scott Parent
Great article Hamlet. It’s great to see this kind of conversation around it.
-Scott
Sep 28th, 2008
sheppy
Just picking up on the XML sitemap comments. I don’t tend to use them if the site’s content structure is pretty good with a good menu hierarchy. I usually only use it on a website that has a lot of content only accessible through search to ensure that pages get indexed by Googlebot. eg like a big article repository website
What is your take on this?
Sep 29th, 2008
billy
Aargh! Who can read gray on black?
Sep 29th, 2008
Scott Parent
Billy,
I believe “talk like a pirate day” was last week.:)
I can read the text just fine. Anyone else having problems?
-Scott
Sep 29th, 2008
Collin - Affiliate Marketing
I personaly think that long tail is the way to go. When I start a new site I research terms that have a volume of traffic looking for them each day. If it happens to end up being a 4 word site name I end up withthats fine because every visitor coming to my site is looking for what the site is about and the name says it all.
Also it dont matter if it is a dot com, net, org or dot ca name either. As long as the site name has to do with the content your all good.
Oct 23rd, 2008
Vikki
Great article! I’ve been in SEO for many years and the dance is always changing. I started before cloaking was a bad thing
Your take on things is refreshing. I also try to remind people to pair their online advertising with offline endeavors that offer visual branding… but some are so stuck on “I have to be #1 for XYZ! Then I won’t have to pay for print ads and radio spots”
With all the outdated misinformation many site owners do a little research and still think “build it and they will come.” and wonder why I get paid to get top listings in competitive markets…. sigh.
Nov 13th, 2008
Cody
Great stuff.
There’s A LOT of outdated crap out there.
I just found Web CEO which so far looks to be a pretty handy free SEO program.
Now, I’m off to get those Landing Pages!
Nov 13th, 2008
Jack
Greate Article. But i have a question. Can Page Rank depends on the Number of Visitor?.
Nov 14th, 2008
Hamlet Batista
Thanks, @Scott
@sheepy XML sitemaps are optional, but they have two primary benefits:
1. Help search engines find all the pages you wanted indexed.
2. Help cut down your bandwidth costs.
A good site structure is a good replacement for the first, but as you add an remove pages from your site, search robots need to revisit it to update their index, but with an XML sitemap they only need to look at one file to find out what changed.
@Collin long tail is the recommended way to get started on SEO. As you make progress, it is wise to try to move up the demand curve.
Thanks, @Vikki
@Cody LOL. You need to check our RankSense too
@Jack traditional PageRank is, as far as I know, a link based metric.
Nov 16th, 2008
Beth
Excellent article (especially for a first post!). I agree completely that getting the right prospects is far more important than getting the most prospects. With your permission, I’d like to use part of this article to help convince my clients of that. Okay with you?
Also, I’d love to hear more from you on link building and baiting. Keep the content coming!
Nov 18th, 2008
Anthony James Barnett - author
A good post - informative and useful. I’m in the process of trying to rack up my web, so I’ll be taking your advice into account.
Thanks
Nov 20th, 2008
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