Landing Pages for SEO

Landing pages are the norm in PPC campaigns - but you should also consider using them for link building SEO campaigns.

After all, when seeking links to their sites, some webmasters make the mistake of thinking that everything has to point to their index page, or else that they need to spread a lot of links around a lot of different product pages. In such instances, these webmasters are overlooking the clear efficiencies of Landing Pages for their link building programs.

What are "Landing Pages"?

Landing Pages are nothing more complicated than information rich pages. Each page can be as niche specific - or general - as required. And although it is common for Landing Pages to be set up as internal pages, sometimes it is simply more efficient to turn a site index page into a single landing page.

Do not think of landing pages as merely a short piece of text to rank with - Landing Pages are essentially the marriage of links and content into a truly fruitful working relationship.

How to set up Landing Pages

It is often a good idea to optimise for multiple keyphrases or topic areas - do so by providing a keyword-rich heading, accompanied by a few sentences of text relating to that keyword/keyphrase, and then accompany this with a keyworded link to your deeper content.

Do this for multiple variations of your most important keywords, and take into account issues such as keyword order (first keyword in a keyphrase/searchterm is determinative in Google, for example), and also plural and singular forms (for example, "insurance[b]s[/b]" is far less competitive than the singular form "insurance".

Of course, also bear in mind geo-targeting and spelling errors, where you feel you can cleanly get away with them. However, remember that Landing Pages are essentially for humans as well as spiders, so the pages must look useful to [I]both[/I].

The Secret of Landing Pages

Really, the principle of the Landing Page for link building purposes, is no different for general on-page SEO. The key point is examining what information you are providing, and providing it on a very selective basis. There is a very subtle different in applying Landing Pages than general content SEO work, because of the extremely selective and targeted manner in which Landing Pages are built.

And here is the secret of Landing Pages - when you set up your keyword anchor text to your Landing Pages, not only will you rank for the keywords in your anchor text - but your anchor text will also combine with your keyworded headings and keyworded on-page links, to produce a wide range of secondary search terms you can rank much more easily for - yet still remain targeted and focussed on your chosen subject area.

This is why Landing Pages have become a generally useful as part of Link Building SEO - because of the extremely controlled way that information can be delivered and targeted.

Are Landing Pages dodgy?

As before, Landing Pages are nothing more than information-rich pages. They suit search engines by providing rich content, and they help human users, by providing clearly focussed pages to find information they need, and help direct them to specialist internal pages for further information as required. And it suits the webmaster, because it allows the traffic to be targeted in a much more precise manner.

Can I see an example of a Landing Page?

I won't provide any commercial examples of a Landing Page, as that would be a little unfair in this environment. However, Roy Troxel at the Webserver Times recently complained that his most popular page was his privacy policy page. If you take a look at it, he has inadvertently produced a landing page, based on the keywords in the headings covered in the privacy policy.

Can I get legitimate links to Landing Pages?

Absolutely - because Landing Pages provide rich information for humans, as well as search engine spiders, then you can easily have them listed at Directories that allow multiple pages to be listed from the same site, such as DMOZ, Sevenseek, and WowDirectory.

Also, directories such as MSN bcentral, Jayde, and Webatlas, also allow for multiple links to internal pages to accompany your entry.

Brian Turner is the director of Britecorp's search engine strategy, and also runs free one-to-one workshops at SEO Lab and the Platinax SEO forums [http://www.platinax.co.uk/forum/search-engine-optimization/].