I have been in the Internet business for more than 13 years and heavily involved in Web development and Internet Marketing for almost the same amount of time. The question or comment I hear most often is “I have a website but I can’t be found on the search engines or my ranking is so low that no one will find my site.” My answer always is “what are you doing to market your site”? The answer is often DAH! This month’s article is about marketing on the Net and subsequent articles will go into more detail on the “how-tos”.

Creating a professionally appearing website is like painting a beautiful landscape or arranging a wonderful array of flowers because it is the work of a person who thinks 3-D and has and knows how to use the tools available to create the masterpiece. A website is no different. Employing a web design company that has demonstrated the ability to create these one-of-kind websites is the first step. After you select the design firm, it is up to you and the design team to develop the look, navigation and content. Content being the most important! Remember, you are not developing this site for you but for a future viewer and hopefully a buyer of your product or service. Once the site is developed and made live on the Internet is where the marketing phase really “kicks in”. I should have mentioned that while the site is being developed, you and your web team need to develop a (1) Great Title (2) Specific keywords/keyword phrases and (3) Attention-getting description. In the old days, about 2003, these were called “meta tags” and were very important because these where what the search engines were looking for; however, times and technology have changed and so to the importance of “meta tags”. I am not saying they are not still useful, I am saying that you should include them but pay more attention to the content you are providing. This site is the “mother-lobe” but remember people surfing the net are very impatient so you need to think outside-the-box and maybe create a LANDING PAGE.

A Landing page is the destination domain name (URL) that users visit after they have clicked on a search engine result, a paid search listing or any other link that might bring visitors to your web site. First of all it is important to understand that search engines rank pages, not sites. A web site hence may have several landing pages optimized for different keywords. While the home page usually is the highest ranking page of a site in the search engines, it would be wrong to assume that it automatically is the best landing page. In fact, any web site optimization should try to get other pages than the home page into the search engines as well. As I mentioned the attention span of web site visitors is very short, so any web page has to grab the attention of visitors and engage them to take an action. This ideally happens on the landing page that is NOT overburden with information but contains useful information and makes a clear call to action to the full site a natural event.

Let me give you an example of the use of a LANDING PAGE and I’ll use one my web sites to show how this works. First, www.savannahtraveler.com is the full site and this is where I want a visitor to LAND and I hope that they come directly to this site using words that they typed into the search block on the major search engines that I have “mirrored” in my use of keywords and phrases on the web site. If you look at the top of page on the savannahtraveler.com website you will see “Savannah Tourist Information, Where to stay, eat, do and have fun with the kids”.

We created a LANDING PAGE at www.coastalempire.com that is essentially a BLOG; however, this blog contains “Content” “Useful Information” and “previous articles/blogs”. The point is get visitors to review what you are offering on the landings page and click on your “call-to-actions” tabs. The key point is that this page is heavily weighted to Savannah and by using blog techniques, we can increase the “freshness” of the content. Also, you gain another link to the Savannah Traveler which is also a plus …more links the better ranking you will get in the Google directory.
Using Landing page(s) must be strategy that each web site owner should consider to gain more traffic to their site. It is an inexpensive option (cost of buying a domain name(s) and a simple web page design (template), easy to do (just start writing) and fun to develop and measure it’s success (look at your stat. report and study the results). Remember, you can have as many “landing pages” as you have the imagination to create. Have Fun!