Whether your advertising streams concentrate on PPC, SEO, newsletter advertising, or a combination of these and any other advertising models, the landing page is one of the most important factors to consider. Primarily, the landing page needs to closely match your visitors’ requirements but it also needs to be set up to convert and persuade those visitors to take the desired action. A desired action can be anything from signing up for a free newsletter or offer to making a purchase - a landing page should lead visitors towards this conclusion.

Meeting Visitors’ Needs Through Page Relevancy

The landing page needs to be relevant to those that visit it. This means researching your visitors and, specifically, what they are looking for. Search engine visitors can be more difficult to read, especially if they have arrived via a long-tail or non targeted keyword. However, the inclusion of SEO and PPC keywords identifies to the visitor that they are on the right page and that the page offers the information they want.

Page relevance has been mentioned within various Internet marketing discussions, and it’s important in landing optimization too. The landing page has to be as relevant as possible to the ad or link that directed a user to that page. When setting up PPC ads, banner ads, and article ads, this should be a simple concept. You know the keywords and you know the content of the ad that led your visitors to that page.

Page relevancy only becomes more of an issue for SEO campaigns. While you undoubtedly target certain pages to specific keywords, visitors have a nasty habit of using completely different keywords and still finding your page. The positive about this is that the keyword they use is more than likely found somewhere on that page, even if it is buried deep in the text.
The underlying moral is that the more relevant the page, the more targeted the visitor and the more targeted a visitor, the more responsive they will prove to be.
Stand Out From The Opposition With Your USP

Identify your USP, or Unique Selling Proposition, and package it so that your visitors can’t live without it. A Unique Selling Proposition is the one thing that makes your service stand out from the service of your competitors. It can be anything from cheaper prices to a personable service to a bunch of free giveaways.
The USP has to offer an advantage to your user. Better profit margins is not something that will attract people to purchase your products. Competitor analysis and market research are vital components to identifying your USP. You need to have intimate knowledge of your own product and service, as well as a similar level of knowledge of your competitors. Identify the stand out reason, or reasons, that make your website the best choice.

Once identified, the USP should become one of your biggest selling points. It should be identified and clearly defined early in the landing page copy and reiterated at an appropriate time later in the page. If you can include it as part of the tag line to your company or advertising campaign then that’s all the better.
Keep Your Visitor’s Attention By Beating The Fold

Beat the fold. In website terms, the fold is the bottom of your web page that is viewable without having to scroll. You should attempt to get all of the most important information across before the fold gets in the way. Another particularly nasty habit that modern surfers tend to adhere to is laziness. In many respects it’s our fault, as Webmasters, too.

We’ve created a virtual world where information is available at the click of the button. We’ve introduced and helped popularize features like video streaming that make information even easier and quicker to access. The result is that visitors take this speed and ease for granted. Clicking the scroll button may not seem a particularly testing action, but it is one that many of your visitors will avoid.

Fortunately, help is at hand in the shape of best practice web content writing. It is considered honest, reliable, and decent (as well as more effective) that you should summarize the contents of a page within the first paragraph. In fact, within the first short paragraph. Legitimately, and without going into finer details, we read and digest information on a computer screen much slower than from paper and to make allowances, landing page copy needs to be direct and use shorter sentence and paragraph structures.
Record Results And Test Changes
A good landing page is an effective one that converts visitors to customers or persuades them to complete your desired action. So, test your page. Get a good analytic package that includes masses of information and keep an eye on results. Make slight alterations rather than huge changes or blocks of changes - test the new page and then repeat the change and test process again until you get the best possible conversion rate.

Reduce Outgoing Links To An Essential Minimum

Don’t link out to too many pages and even try to minimize the number of navigation links you have above the fold. Links and navigational links are designed to stand out from the rest of your content and, you guessed it, surfers are easily distracted. Don’t go out of your way to move the navigation menu on landing pages, but if you’re designing a site from scratch try to keep those pesky and distracting elements down to a minimum (and that includes Flash pages).

Offering Incentives To Buy
If all else fails, offer an incentive. Give something away that offers true value. Offer a discount on larger orders or free shipping on all orders. Yet again, we go back to the irritating habits of surfers and consumers and one of the strongest of all those habits is looking for something for nothing, or something extra for no extra. Write an ebook, source re-brandable software, offer free shipping or three items for the price of two. Do something to grab your reader’s attention.

By Matt Jackson
Aside from berating surfers for being inconsiderate, lazy, freeloaders with no attention span Matt Jackson also partakes in web content writing and SEO copywriting with WebWiseWords.

The tactics I’m going to show you won’t cost you anything but your time, BUT - they are not a quick fix. To get a genuine steadily growing stream of targeted visitors takes time.

Reciprocal links
The search engines look to see how many other websites have links to yours. The more links coming into your site, the further up the rankings ladder you will get.

Find twenty websites that are in the same business as you. Not direct competitors ones that deal with related products or services. Check to see if they have a ‘Links’ page. If so contact them, tell them who you are and what your site is about, and ask them if they would exchange links. It will help if you put a link to their site on your ‘Links’ page first.

Usually they will do so, as they will know the value of incoming links as well. Vary the wording of your email for each site you contact and point out something you like about it. Make it personal.

Articles
Many Internet marketers run away from article writing because they think it’s too difficult. The truth is it’s much easier than you think once you’ve got the hang of it.

Writing articles about your business is easy because you know the subject and are enthusiastic about it. It should be a pleasure to talk about the products or theme of your site.

So here’s the plan:

1. Take one aspect of your product or theme.

2. Think of three pieces of information that people would find interesting and informative, and write these down on paper.

3. Now take each one of these in turn and tell your readers what is so interesting, fascinating and instructive about each.

4. When you’ve done that add an introduction at the top and a concluding sentence or two at the bottom.

5. Finally, compose an ‘author’s bio’ which says who you are what your website is, and include a link to your site. This is a one-way link back to your site.

That’s your article done! Now you need to submit it to some article directories such as EzineArticles.com. Google ‘article directories’ and you will find lots more.

Write one article a week and submit it to a handful of the best high PR directories.

Make your site a search engine magnet

Take time to find the right keywords for your site. You can use a tool like the free GoodKeywords.com keyword finder or online resources like the Google Keyword Tool.

Find ten or twelve high volume keywords and put these on your home page. Don’t be tempted to put dozens. It won’t work.

Now go to each page and put no more than three keywords related to the subject of that page on them, making sure that the page name, the page title and the page description include at least the main keyword for that page. The search engines love this.

Once you’ve got these basic strategies in place you should see a steady increase in visitor numbers. And keep plugging away at all three to get a cumulative effect.

Mervyn Love
Mervyn Love writes articles on various aspects of Internet Marketing, and his website - fortresspublishing.com - has a wealth of resources and information on all aspects of starting and running an online business. Join his newsletter here: http://www.fortresspublishing.com/MPNsplash.html

Search Engine Optimization is Not Always the Answer

Search engine optimization has a purpose. Keyword targeting lets search engines link their users to your website when they look for your keywords. They will not do this satisfactorily without optimizing your site with proper web design techniques. Unfortunately, however, it is more complicated than that. Have you ever wondered why Google will almost always place Ebay on the first few pages when anything is entered into the search field accompanied with the word buy?The word buy has been targeted from more sites than you could count so what makes Ebay special.

For example, take the word bike. If a person uses Google by searching for the string buy bike, a page from Ebay will usually be listed before any of the major bicycle makers. It goes without saying that any of the major bicycle dealers have spent a great deal more time targeting keywords related to bikes than a site that manages hundreds of thousands of different products. The answer to this problem is the nature of this article.

Can My Website Compete?

The answer is to increase the importance of your site in the eyes of the major search engines. Ebay gets searched before many other sites because it has been decided by the search engines to be more popular with internet users. So what I am offering the little guy is a way to do what Ebay and the other ‘big dogs’ have done to become popular.

The world of search engines boil down to the stereotypical high school hierarchy. Search engines pay more attention to those that are popular. In high school, teens usually become popular by having popular people associate with them. The online world is no different. But how do search engines know that popular sites are associating with you? That is an easy one - they link to your website. The three biggest search engine players all crawl the web indexing links to and from all the websites that they have found. They create a ranking system based on many factors, but the most substantial one is how many sites link to you. It could be argued that an optimized site is key, and my opinion expressed here is based on the assumption that your site has been built with proper design techniques. It is also assumed that you have well written content based on your main products or ideas. If you feel that your website does not currently qualify as well written or properly designed, I recommend that you rectify these issues before attempting to build your popularity as it may turn out to be a waste of time.

Do Not Jump Right into Getting Links

There are many tempting ways to get other sites to link to you that are very unsavory. I choose to address these first. These include:

* sites that promote linking as a primary activity.

* sites that have illegal or inappropriate content.

* sites that are entirely unrelated to your target market

Sites that do nothing more than link to other sites may look like a great option but a site without content is not very popular with the search engines. They need to offer something to internet surfers in order to be important. If they are not important to the search engines then a link from them should not be important to you. Link marketing is based on quality links not the amount of links. I advise staying away from these sites all together. Next it goes without saying, sites with illegal and inappropriate content are never a safe bet.

Getting a Good Start with Link Marketing

Most of us do not have a lot of expendable income starting out so I do not spend much time explaining the options that involve paying large sums of money. In my experience, webmasters with that kind of money contact a company to handle this for them (I have had enough of them as clients to know). I intend on putting out another article to cover this option more in depth, however this article only covers the less costly options.

There are 3 cheap ways to get get some link popularity:

* Ezine articles

* Field related forums

* Banner/Link exchanges

Ezine Articles

Ezines are online magazines. Ezine articles offer two great benefits. First and foremost, they allow you to link to your site from your article or resource area. Also, they offer a chance to show off the knowledge you have in your field. Although this is essentially a free way to get a quality link, it does come with some work. You must be able to write a content rich article on a topic related to your site. Most Ezine sites do not mind giving you the opportunity to get your name out there but you need to provide them with a well written article that offers something to their users. Searching for ezine databases on any major search engine should provide you with a list of great sources for this linking method. Be sure to consult the guidelines of an ezine site in which you decide to submit articles.

Related forums

Forums are another great opportunity to get your site out there without paying up. Again, it does take some time. Find forums that cater to questions about your field. For instance, if you sell natural supplements for joint pain, search for forums related to arthritis. Find strings that are talking about different options for arthritis or ask about what works. This opens a perfect opportunity to link to your site. It is important to know that most forums are not keen on letting sales pitches post for long. The trick here is to offer up quality information on these posts. You could compare your arthritis product to others, you could even provide a plug for a competitor (attempting to prove yourself superior, of course). This makes your post look less like a sales or link pitch and helps make the internet more content driven like it was intended to be.

Banner/Link Exchanges

There are usually two main ways you can get a banner or link on another site without offering any content. You can pay them a fee, or you can offer a trade. Like the other two options, only target sites that are related to you in some way. Exchanges require a little research on your part. You want to search for your potential link partner to see that they are worth the trade. A easy rule of thumb is to check their pagerank compared to yours. You can use this free tool to compare at http://www.checkpagerank.net. Put your web address in and check your pagerank as well as theirs. If you are paying for a link and they have a pagerank of zero it would be wise to save your money. If you are trading links, use your better judgment. If they have a quality site it may be worth the exchange in hopes that their site takes off and they can share a little of their success with you.

Take note that a link from no single site will boost your website’s importance significantly. Every quality link helps a little bit so you need to practice all methods for some time before you see the results you want. Stick with it and be patient.

By Mason Curry
Mason Curry - Lead Designer, Vexart Studio Web Design Fort Wayne Web Design