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3.6 Tune up the landing page

First, let′ s see what we have:

  • a landing page waiting to be optimized
  • a list of keywords for your landing page
  • software that lets you make an ideal landing page

Quite enough to make your site a success. And, one by one, you′ ll make things to add flavor to your page.

Give your page a good title

Page titles are displayed by Search Engines in their results pages. So this title is quite often the most prominent thing for your users, and for Search Engines. And sure, as it′ s the first thing they learn about your page, its importance is huge. That′ s why we start from the title.

Page′ s title in Google results
Page′ s title in Google results

Oh, my wife would tell you the same thing, for sure! The first thing to learn matters a lot.

Think of this: when we met at that unicorn party, what could my friend tell about her?

Here are just two of the options: "Hi Dan, this is Linda, my sister′ s roommate. She′ s so fun to get drunk with!"
or
"Hi Dan, this is Linda, my sister′ s roommate. She loves Depeche Mode like you do."

I guess it′ s obvious, what′ d make me think better of her.

Sure, the number of options is unlimited. And, telling you the truth, what my friend in fact said about my future wife was: "Dan, meet Linda, Kelly′ s roommate". Then he whispered "Don′ t miss this butt!".

I wish all page titles could work as great on crawlers and users, as this phrase worked on me ;)

Now, make a TITLE for your landing page.

Note: page title should be unique for your website. It′ s better if you don′ t have two pages that bear the same title.

Keyword list

Look at your list of keywords.

For the title, take your first major (green) keyword, then a couple supplementary (yellow) ones, depending on how long they are. Plus, you need something descriptive, telling about the purchase, or discount, or delivery, or anything else concerning your service that will let the title stand out.

And remember:

Always try to start your page title from keywords , and put other words in the end.

You can separate keywords by comma (,), hyphen (–), or pipe sign (|). Most webmasters use pipe. Fine, but it doesn′ t look natural. The title just doesn′ t read like a real phrase.

Use commas or hyphens — this makes no difference to Search Engines, but looks more human to users.

Another thing to remember: The length of your title should not exceed 65 characters (including spaces), as otherwise it will be truncated by a Search Engine.

For instance, a great title for your weddings–related website would be:
Wedding ideas, dresses, accessories — free delivery in Sydney

As a title tag, and it looks like this:
<title>Wedding ideas, dresses, accessories — free delivery in Sydney</title>

Here′ s a real title from the website http://www.weddingchannel.com:

Title example 1

And just some more examples of nice titles:

Title example 2
Title example 3

Now WebSite Auditor helps you make a perfect title. Look at the part of Page Structure Audit Report describing the Page Title (title length, duplicate titles, etc.). Check the recommended number of words and keyword density there, and make a nice title that fits. Make use of your keywords, like I said before. And, remember it should look attractive to a human.

Don′ t wait to upload the pages with new titles to the server. Just do it and see what effect it can take!

DO IT NOW! Change the title of your web page and make sure it appears on the Internet.

Add Meta description tags


What′ s in fact a Meta description tag? This tag is used to give a user a brief overview of your page. Although it has no influence on rankings, you′ d better not ignore it, as in most cases Meta description forms a snippet.

What′ s a snippet? Well, snippets appear below the links on Search Engines′ results pages and are designed to give users a sense for what′ s on the page and why it′ s relevant to their query. Surely, it can either attract users or scare them off.

A page′ s Meta description displayed in Google
A page′ s Meta description displayed in Google

Here′ s how Meta description tag looks like:
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of your page.">

There are several things you should remember about meta descriptions:

  • they should be unique and relevant for every page, so avoid duplicate descriptions
  • their length should not exceed 155 characters (including spaces) if you want your snippets appear in SERP nice
  • they should make a user eager to click the result and learn more, that′ s why you′ d better include information about sales, free delivery, reviews, etc.

So here′ s what you need to do: stuff your Meta description with keywords, though reasonably, and make it look like an irresistible invitation to your web page.

Want some examples? Here′ s where guys have done a good job:

Meta description example 1
Meta description example 2

Here′ s an example of how a description can be written:

<meta name="description" content="Get fantastic wedding ideas, best wedding gifts, nice cards, all kinds of wedding flowers and any wedding accessories for weddings all over Australia.">

Now look what the report says about keywords density and description length. For your site, make it as close to what′ s recommended in WebSite Auditor, as possible. And, like you did with the page title, make description tags available online.

Meta description data from WebSite Auditor
Meta description data from WebSite Auditor

Implement rich snippets

Do you know how to make your listing on the results page even more appealing and informative? Have you heard about rich snippets? Well, it′ s high time to learn what it is and how they can help your website promotion.

Rich snippets appear if you implement a special markup, which signals to Search Engines that a certain page is about a particular item (i.e. person, place, product, video, recipe, etc.), like in the examples below:

  • Review

    Review rich snippet
  • Music

    Review rich snippet
  • Recipes

    Review rich snippet
  • Video

    Review rich snippet

No doubt, such search results look more catchy and informative and therefore can drive more visitors to your site. Implementation of such markups like schema.org will require some time and your webmaster′ s help, but believe me, it′ s worth that effort!

You′ ll find more information about the implementation of such markups at http://schema.org/ and http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1211158.

Also, before publishing your web pages with schema, I suggest entering the code into the Rich Snippets Testing Tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets). It shows the information that a Search Engine can pull from the schema code and offers a quick diagnosis of any errors.

That′ s it with the Meta tags I guess...

But you may ask: What about Meta keywords?

Well, in the early days of search the "keywords" attribute was popularized by Search Engines and was one of the ranking factors. However, it was often misleading and by the early 2000′ s most Search Engines stopped relying onto it. In 2009 Matt Cutts from Google said that these tags are no longer taken into account. That′ s why filling these tags will have no value for your SEO efforts.

Moreover, if you fill these tags with the keywords you promote, there′ s a chance that your competitors will peep into these data (just like you probably did when searching for ideas during keyword research, remember?). That′ s why, even if you haven′ t filled in these tags, you may sleep peacefully

DO IT NOW! Add TITLE and Meta description tags and upload the changed pages to your web server.

49 comments

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#447 2009-08-09 16:56:34 Lowell Nickens

I've been tuning up my landing pages and have been amazed that the top 10 competitors of mine in many categories have Optimization percentages as much as 60 percentage points lower than mine and are the top ranked competitor in Yahoo. When I look at the cached page report for their landing page it's littered from top to bottom with the search phrases that they are optimizing for. Doing that makes it impossible to get a good optimization score. Is this a situation where you can either optimize your pages to get better natural rankings or forget about optimizing your pages and just back link them to death or whatever other strategy might work because it sure doesn't look like these competitors even know what optimizing a landing page is all about and they're in the top 10. I'd love to get some response on this.

Thanks, Lowell

Answer
#398 2009-06-15 06:40:30 Dan Richmond

Still some keywords are getting more searches than the other and/or are more closely related to your business offer. It's obvious that if you want to optimize, say, your webpage's title, you cannot give the first position to <b>all</b> your keywords. You need to choose one which is the most important, optimize for it in the first turn. Then use the ones which are also profitable, but be ready that you will not be able to equally optimize for them.

But you can gain higher rankings for these words due to link builing.

Answer
#396 2009-06-10 15:55:55 Investigator Jobs

thanks for the quick reply.

The trouble Im having is that if I have 3+ very good keywords that are very much the same... Wouldnt I want those kwrd's grouped together on the same page?
But, if I do that... I cant FULLY optimize my page for each keyword which is "what I want to do". Than at the same time if I created 3 seperate pages, than the content would seem redundant. to seperate or not?

I have pages that have 4-10 realy good keywords on them however, Im thinking that even though they are "related to the page" and seem to belong together.... I should be seperating them so that I can fully optimize each keyword for the SE traffic.

Is it correct to say that you WONT get Google rankings and/or traffic from 3rd and 4th level keywords on that page because the page is primarily optimized for the first and maybe 2nd keyword.

Im still trying to wrap my head around this?

?

Answer
#395 2009-06-10 05:46:32 Dan Richmond

<b>@ Andrew Collins</b>

Normally you would have one main keyword or phrase for a page, plus a few complimentary ones. So it's most important for you to optimize for this most important keyphrase in the first turn.

So in WebSite Auditor, you make analysis for your #1 keyphrase first, and tune-up your page for it.

After your page is ideally optimized for this most important keyphrase, go over the rest of your keywords and optimize for them as well, but make sure that this does not change the distribution of your main keyphrase.

Answer
#392 2009-06-09 13:17:22 Investigator Jobs

I have a question that I cant seem to wrap my head around. Im sure the answer is very simple but, I have to ask anyways.

When using WebAudit, are we basing our revisions on 1 KEYWORD per page only - (our best keyword out of the 5+ we have for that page?) - and than optimizing everything around that 1 keyword and thats it (not running the other keywords at all?)

or

Should we be entering all of our 5+ keywords for that page at the same time in WebAudit and/or going back and entering them all each 1 by 1? (and optimizing via WebAudit for all 5keywrds)


From what I can tell, this method is geared towards using only the 1 or 2 main keywords for your page and not even running the other 3+keywrds?
I cant see it possible to adhere to the wordcount and title requirements for all of the pages 5+ keywords at the same time.

Am I close?

Is it safe to say that if I want to optimize a page for a keyword, that it has to be the main keyword for the page and not the 3r'd or 4'th down on the list of keywords for that page?
In other words, its mainly ONLY 1 or 2 keywords per page to be run on WebAudit (the rest are just complimentary backup?) and if I want to be FULLY optimized for a keyword in the SE's, that keyword will need to be the main keyword on its own page.



Answer
#368 2009-06-02 12:07:06 Dan Richmond

<b>@ Krisjanis Berzins</b>

Well I don't think it's a good idea.

1) If you want to use your brand name in the title for <i>optimization</i> then it's quite enough to use it in just a couple of pages. One page in search engine results for your brand name is absolutely enough to bring you visitors searcheing for you by the brand name.

Page title is too important for SEO to stuff it with the words that won't bring you much traffic. And the brand name hardly will.

2) If you want to use your brand name in the title to constantly remind the user where they are - well that also seems like a short-sighted approach. I'm sure there's enough identity staff on your site so that your user doesn't forget which company's website he/she is viewing.

Answer
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