Targeting traffic to your website is by far the most important SEO maintenance task that any Webmaster or SEO technician must manage to insure a steady flow of traffic to a website.
There are many different methods of building these targeted pages, commonly known as “gateway” or “landing” pages, and many non-experienced Webmasters and SEO techs will spend countless hours trying to build the perfect landing page and fail because they “over built” their pages.
What is a landing page?
A “landing” or “gateway” page is a webpage that is optimized to gain high SERPs placement on Google and the other major search engines for a specific keyword. All of the content is centered around this keyword to attract traffic and excite visitors with this content and compile them take your “calls to action”.
This sounds straightforward and simple, but the real secret in building quality landing pages lies in following a few guidelines and optimization strategies.
Build your first landing page
This technique applies to “static” websites, but the principals can be applied to blogs as well.
The easiest way to get started is to make an exact copy of your home page, and rename it. The benefit of using your sites index page as your landing page template is that all of your sites navigation and image links etc are already pointing to the correct locations, so all you will be doing is making edits to make your new landing pages to include relevant content, and Meta data.
So we copy index.html and save it as “template.html”, once we have our new template page we will want to clean up the Meta content and choose an appropriate new page name and title. If you were marketing party supplies in the Detroit area, then the perfect page name would be “detroit-party-supplies.html”.
With this new page “detroit-party-supplies.html”, we need to choose a keyword rich page title. With a little keyword research before hand, we should have all of the top keywords/phrases for our niche. If we also promote keywords like, low cost, cheap, or similar keywords, then we might use “Save Money on Detroit Party Supplies”.
The main idea is to create many pages that target specific keywords and phrases, so we might even build additional pages using variations on “detroit-party-supplies.html”, and our title, “Save Money on Detroit Party Supplies” to further capitalize on popular keywords for this niche.
Optimizing your pages
The most important step in building our new landing pages is stripping away all of the code and other page elements that will hurt or weaken our SERPs placement. If you are unsure on what constitutes “bad code” then you should review some of my articles on SEO, or check out Google’s webmasters tools. Don’t use any flash, external java script, or embedded style coding.
Our new landing pages will only be focusing on content directly relating to our page name and keywords, and should meet these guidelines:
1. Use no more than 3 relating keywords
2. Include the primary keyword in the H1 text
3. Use a keyword density of no more than 5%
4. Have a minimum of 450 words of relevant content
As you build your landing pages, the next important step is getting them indexed with your sites other pages. I have found the easiest way to do this is by adding anchor text links on your “main” landing page for all of your new landing pages, and then adding a single link on your sites home page. Once you have added your links, the next step is to rebuild your sitemap. This method will allow all of your newly added landing pages to be crawled each time search engine spiders visit your site.
Keep in mind that as you build new landing pages you must remember to add anchor text on your “main” landing page or these new pages will not be indexed each time your site is crawled.
Track your progress
Your new landing pages should have an analytic or tracking code added to the last line before
