What is Your Landing Page Doing? Part 1 of 4

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I titled this post Part 1, because I am going to be doing a series on the how-to’s of Landing Page Optimization, but I wanted to do a quick write up because of some bad experiences I had this weekend while surfing some websites and blogs, and because this is so crucial to your online business success and Internet Marketing efforts.

While surfing for some information I landed on a couple of websites and within 30 seconds, I was thinking “WTF??”

I clicked on these sites because the Title and Description in search results promised to provide what I was looking for, but once I landed there, that dream was dead.

I could not find a hint of the promised land, and on one of the sites I got bombarded with at least 50 units of Adsense before seeing a glimpse of relevant information, and I quickly clicked off and moved on.

The landing page is so crucial for visitor retention, not to mention their return. A landing page is the page that visitors first land on when visiting your site either from search results, or from any backlinks to your site. Usually the landing page is the home page, but it’s actually any page that is linked to and from where visitors can get to your website.

What happened to me today has happened to all of us more than once, and there is no bigger turn off.

Also, it is important to realize that we are experienced webmasters, (or getting there ) we understand websites and navigation on a deeper level, BUT you have to assume that all of your visitors are complete novices, and they need obvious and clear indications of what is on your site and how to navigate it.

The landing page is really the “first impression” of your site and its content. What is your Landing Page doing?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your website clearly defining what you have to offer?

2. Is there some kind of welcome message that explains what’s there?

3. Is the content relevant to the title and description?

4. When visitors land on your page, are they easily able to navigate to different sections and pages within your site?

5. When they land, are they met with valuable relevant information or do they have to muddle through a ton of Affiliate adds, like adsense and banners?

If you answered NO to some of these questions then you will have problems with keeping your visitors and you can bet that they will not return.

Remember that the Internet revolves around the ease of getting information, if a surfer has to jump through a thousand hoops to find what their looking for on your website, believe me, they won’t, and why should they? There are millions of other sites where they will find what their looking for with ease.

This is especially true for bloggers, I surfed about a hundred blogs this weekend and found many whose landing pages were just awful. One of which is actually a high traffic “guru” blog. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, BEWARE of GURUS their not always right…but I digressed.

Because blogs do not usually have the same navigation layout as websites, instead of pages they have posts, they should be even more diligent in the landing page layout and navigation; especially since posts are THE content of a blog and so they should be placed at a top spot, with a proper header, like “All Posts” or “Recent Posts” where individual post titles are listed for easy access and navigation. A visitor shouldn’t have to spend 1/2 hour looking for posts and believe me they won’t.

Don’t let a bad landing page and navigation set-up affect your online business, affiliate marketing websites and Internet marketing efforts.

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