Concept of landing page is not very clear to most of the webmasters. Even in Wikipedia, which has become a standard reference now for many topics, there is no external reference (at the time of this writing) in Landing Page. We found a good writing from Wikipedia External link in Landing page optimization (not Landing page proper). The article is written by Avinash Kaushik, with the title Experimentation and Testing: A Primer long ago in in May 2006. It is quite evident from his writing, he is very knowledgeable person and he has documented A/B testing, Multivariate analysis mainly for marketing purpose. Furthermore, we think many people do not understand the principle of the testings. So, here is a detailed guide on landing page and optimization of this landing page for non-business (or non product selling) websites.
Landing page is the pages, for which searches are most often made by visitors from Google search engine with certain keywords (that has some value). It is to be noted that, a link to other page from the landing page, for which the searches were actually made and visitors arrived can be a landing page.
For example, a category page or a Tag page can be a landing page. Searches were actually made for the contents of these pages, which are actually hyperlinks to other posts of that category. Seems it became more complex to you. We are giving a working example. Visitors (a good proportion) often visits this site searching with Windows 7 Themes. It is
not that they always search with Windows 7 Themes and land to that category page. They can search with other terms such as “Glass Onion Theme” which belongs to Windows 7 Themes category and Tag. Google understands that the content of Windows 7 Themes is itself is valuable so Google has marked it as one of the Top Landing Page of this website and awarded us a sitelink.
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The most important implication and practical value lies in this phrase : Top Landing Pages. In Google Webmaster Tools under Site configuration, if you click on Sitelinks (and if you have integrated Google analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, you will see this line :
Popular sitelinks may appear in the Top Landing Pages report in Google Analytics.
The hyperlink is made with Google Analytics Top Landing pages, which is infact under Content in Google Analytics. Entrances, Bounces, Bounce rate and the url of the page is given as a list there. So, you can have an idea of your good landing pages from there.
Why I should think to optimize the landing pages?
Because, these are the guest rooms of your website. You must “decorate” your guest room nicely with flowers, perfumes, a nice couch to give a nice rest to your visitors. The decoration in your website with flowers, perfumes a good sitting arrangement means the best possible optimization (SEO) : both on site and off site, so the visitors can rest (=less bounce rate). You can optimize the speed (if possible) by removing some things from there or place the highest paying Advertisement units there.
How you can improve your landing page?
- Optimize Meta description and Meta Keywords (though keywords has less value now).
- Speed up as loading time as far as you can.
- Reassure visitors that your site is an elegant website – remove the pop-ups, keep an eye on grammar, show security info of your website, Alexa rank (if you think). Remove the big box Ad appearing to hit the nose of the visitor.
- Use good color combination. Orange text on fluorescent green background looks very bad, if you have such class of choice, you probably is not reading this article.
- Understand what visitors want from you. Define your own goals.
- Well, our dear repeat visitors; how many times this will be we are repeating this? Please construct your website’s navigation in a meaningful logical way.
- Think judiciously about tags.
- Think judiciously about nofollow, no indexing tag and category pages in WordPress.
