How to Create Effective Landing Pages
In posts earlier this month we talked about how to pick good keywords for your site and using landing pages to help you get "long tail" traffic from search engines. Today I'm going to write about how to optimize your landing page for the keywords you choose.
In order to demonstrate the concept I just created a page a few minutes ago to target people looking for "free online romance reads". This isn't a popular term with only 140 searches each month in the U.S. according to Google but I picked it because our site isn't currently ranked in the top 100 for it so it will be a perfect test case.
If you haven't already, click on the page and check it out. The first thing to look at is the URL itself. I've got the keyword phrase "free online romance reads" in the name. That's an important piece. You should also notice I use the term in the title of the page "Free Online Romance Reads by Lizzy Ford", the main heading or "h1″ tag on the page is also my keyword phrase. None of these are 100% must haves but they all help.
Now for the text itself. The first sentence has the phrase in it, but then I only get a chance to sneak it in one more time in the text. Is that enough? I think so because the page is short. A good general rule of thumb on longer articles is to have your keywords be about 5% of your total content. My page is 318 words long and 8 them are keywords for a total of about 2.5%. Should I sneak the phrase in another time? Nah, it's fine. I think a third use of would appear unnatural and I've already used it in the page name, page title and header.
It really can be a fine line sometimes between using your keyword enough to get a good ranking in Google, and using it too much and getting penalized for "spamming" your keywords. Did I pull it off? We'll find out shortly. As I said earlier our site currently isn't ranked in the top 100 results of Google for that term. The term isn't very popular so if we want to rank for it and are willing to put in the effort we should be able to. If in a week or two we're still not ranked for "Free Online Romance Reads" then it's back to the drawing board. If I wake up in two day's and we're on the front page of Google for them, then mission accomplished and you got a front row seat for the creation of a landing page that is pulling traffic from Google to our site.
