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Chapter 3: An offer they can't refuse (create mind-blowing landing pages for Search Engines and people)

Now,

  • All nasty mistakes are corrected
  • Frames and flash are done with.
  • Your site is submitted to Search Engines
  • Crawlers will have no problem looking at it

And we can get down to on-page optimization as it is. Exactly what you'll learn and do this time is:

Go ahead with the guide, and you'll see what stands behind these tricky titles. Warning: you've got a real lot to learn, but remember this is a practical guide, so guess what? You have even more to DO, getting ready for the big success day. And this time, the talk is about on-page optimization, which is twisting and changing pages on your website, as opposed to off-page optimization, which is, playing with SEO–related things that exist outside your web pages.

Here′s an example.

Last time me and my wife came back after a holiday trip, we looked at our house and realized at once: our elder boy has had a rocking party. These teenagers nearly ruined the house! But that's not the point.

Preparing for the party, Mike got lots of music CDs, plenty of beer and he even decorated the house. (I never thought my son had a sense of beauty :) This was similar to on–page optimization.


And, together with his 2 friends they decided whom to invite and gave out dozens of invitation cards. This is pretty much like off–page optimization works. Both on-page and off-page optimization can help you get a better position in Search Engines, that is, to drive more visitors to your site. Or, in terms of our material world, what you're going to do now will definitely drive more money to your bank account. So why wait? Let's go.

3.1 Imagine you're on a plane, or What's a landing page?

Think of the word: landing.

I guess one of the first things to associate is a landing field. And indeed, it has pretty much in common with a landing page.

OK, now let's imagine you're on a plane, and it's about to land. Here's the picture: the Boeing's wheels meet the runway, and in a couple of moments, it taxies to the landing field. You see a tube attached, and in just a couple of moments, you rush to the airport building together with a flow of people. Now think: where do they all go to? Either to register and take a taxi to a hotel, or to wait at the terminal, amusing themselves getting souvenirs and duty–free spirits.

And here's the essence: of these crowds of people that arrive, no one stays at the landing field for long, and nobody leaves it by the same path they came. The stream of people moves where it should move, and that's pretty much the same direction for all. Putting it in SEO terms, all visitors proceed further.

So if your web page were a landing field, nobody'd be able to hit the Back button in the browser. And, because you can't say "Don't hit the back button!", your goal is to set your visitor in a mood to do what you expect (e.g. buy, or click a link, or leave a comment and so on), and not click the backward arrow.

A landing page can look like a plain–text article, or like a bunch of short couple–of–words product descriptions, a directory of articles, a form to enter visitor's name and email, or else.

Look here for examples. That's the URL of a nice landing page that invites you to visit a beauty salon: http://www.rush.co.uk/ or here's a landing page that directs its visitors to enter their names and contact information: https://www.telegraphdelivery.com.au/.

Whatever it looks like, a landing page's created for two main purposes:

  1. Attracting visitors
  2. Keeping them and making them proceed further and complete certain actions (sign up for a newsletter, place an order, leave a review, etc.)

These two things can be the steps to your first million, so remember them! And — let's come up to the table.

40 comments

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#1744 2010-12-13 17:04:03 Martin Potokar

I recently found this site over the w/e as I am always interested in reading and learning about what others may have to say regarding SEO. As the majority of the posts appear to date back to 2008, I would assume that 'SEO in Practice' was also written sometime back then. As I have been working and experimenting with SEO techniques for a number of years, the information provided in the chapters I have read thus far appears to be very basic. While the quizzes included at the end of each chapter is a good idea, especially for those new to SEO, it's just my 2-cents worth but I don't feel that offering a certificate entitled, 'SEO in Practice', 'Professional Internet Marketor' is a good idea. To be honest, it's misleading to the average consumer since they may more than likely believe that the person displaying this certificate on their website is a bonafide SEO expert when in reality, they're not. Let's face it, SEO is not something that can be learned much less successfully be applied overnight to give people the results they want. Once again, this is just my 2-cents worth but I think it would be in your best interest to remove the certificate from the site. All in all, the information provided is a good read for those wanting to establish a foundation in learning about SEO.

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#1614 2010-10-17 20:18:11 Bud Mulki

Hi Dan,

Thanks so much for the advice so far. God I know so little, your first 2 chapters have exposed so many flaws in my current site. Feels like i've got a long way to go, but im going to start again and try to apply your principles to my current site. Out of interest i have gif animations on the site and a couple of flash photo galleries, are these a no no? On my homepage there is a sound file that plays when it loads, is this also considered to be a problem? Also whats your thoughts on this. I have put a list of key words on the master page so that it appears on every page. The text is the same colour as the background so it cant be seen by the user, can robots see this text and is it bad practice?

Look forward to reading the rest. got a few late nights ahead of me....

Regards

Bud
www.giadiamondjewellery.com

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#1557 2010-09-15 09:01:08 chuanlin mu

thanks for sharing it

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#1055 2010-03-16 18:31:22 John Fenton

On thekidswindow site... I have a few SEO related questions.

The top of the page seems good, but once you roll down a bit you are confronted with a wall of text. Was that wall of text really needed to get the rankings? (that part of the page obviously could have been redesigned to make it more aesthetic.)

From a use ability standpoint... I would have made most of the bullet points near the top of the site hyper links. Would the extra links have hurt the page any from an SEO standpoint.

On the See out TV Ad item. Would it really hurt to make both the image and the text link able?

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#1011 2010-02-09 18:51:22 Tim Inglis

@ Paul Watchthorn

They not only have one of the more poorly constructed sites I've seen in a long time (tables for layout... GET OUT OF THE 90's!!!), but they have used JavaScript to disable the right click, which is why you couldn't view the source.

If you're using Firefox, go to "View >> View Source". In Internet Exploder 8, "Page >> View Source" and you will be able to view the source code.

Hope this helps.

Tim.

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#901 2010-01-01 12:06:40 Paul Watchorn

I had a look at the Childrens clothing page, I thought I would have a look at the source code, can't get it to come up on the home page, just a copyright notice interesting, I have never seen that before, I did not think it was possible.
The second page 'appeared' not to have any keywords in the tags either.
All interesting stuff, it all makes for interesting research!

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#810 2009-12-08 19:52:53 Ken Taylor

Didn't really appreciate this until I read the following comment from @Dan (just above this comment)

"I keep saying here that the content of your webpages should be good from the user's point of view in the first turn. Value comes first, SEO second..."


I'm doing Adsense using micro-niche sites. So in a sense, each one of my five pages is a landing page--It sole purpose is to create value for that KW that the page is optimized for.

Side note: Just for fun I ran the Kids clothing link through the previous lesson's Validator. The results:
23 errors
10 warnings

I too was turned off by the site, but I clicked away with a lesson learned on the importance of how "value" and "people-eye-friendly-usable" a landing page/home page/any page should be.

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#529 2009-10-16 09:01:05 Dan Richmond

<b>@Dirk Weemaes</b>

I keep saying here that the content of your webpages should be good from the user's point of view in the first turn. Value comes first, SEO second. And in fact it's absolutely impossible to make webpages reachable only via search engines. I guess you're misinterpreting the whole thing here...

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#525 2009-10-14 03:18:07 Dirk Weemaes

Hi Dan,
I actually am quite happy with the contents of my website. It is to the point and focused on lay out rather than attracting guests to the hotel.
Would it be wrong to make landing pages as per your instructions, just for the purpose of ranking high in Google f.e., without the landing pages being part of the website for someone typing in the homepage URL directly. There would in other words be no links on my website to these landing pages so that people would never be able to serve to them from my website; The landing pages would only be reachable via a search. The philosophy behind this that I want to keep the look and esthetics of my website the way it is now.
Regards,
dirk

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#2700 2012-01-18 09:50:08 Ronald Bryan

The kids site did look good above the fold, the problem is the webmaster went on to add to much information, it might be spider friendly, but it is not human friendly. The newspaper site they could have put the subscription email button below the headline

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#2701 2012-01-18 09:54:31 Ronald Bryan

I think that should have been a too I am a terrible speller.So, if you see an error that needs my attention please, share that with me I want to give the impression I care=)

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#489 2009-09-17 05:19:59 Dan Richmond

<b>Oscar Del Santo</b>

I used this tool earlier but it has nothing to do with SEO - you only track the page's ability to convert. It is good enough to test your page copy (although Google's results here are not too reliable - you will notice that if you also have your own system for statistics).

WebSite Auditor will rather check your pages from the SEO point of view - to increase their ability to rank high in search engines.

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