By Michael Cordova (c) 2006

A landing page is a website page that is created for one purpose – to persuade the site visitor to convert into a customer by making a sale, completing a form (thereby becoming a qualified lead), signing up for a newsletter, etc.

We provide this landing page quick reference so you can pull it out every time you are creating a persuasive landing page. It is divided into 4 sections and is intended to be an all-inclusive tip sheet.

Most importantly, consider that you have 8 seconds or less to convince your visitor to act. If you haven’t convincingly made your case in this time then your visitor will move on and will be lost, as the Internet has created the most fickle customer in sales history.

Page Layout

- Place your logo at the top left. Visitors expect it there so display your branding where it counts.

- If the visitor came from a search engine keyword search or a PPC ad, then place the keyword terms in bold at the top of the page. This reinforces to the visitor that they came to the right place.

- Always keep the Golden Triangle in mind. It is the most important and scanned part of the page. It is the area of the page that starts at the top left of the page moves to the top right side of the page then down diagonally to the bottom left of the page just above the fold. The fold is the area of a webpage that the visitor sees without scrolling vertically. You should never force a visitor to scroll horizontally. This means that your landing pages should be able to be seen completely on an 800 x 600 screen resolution. Place your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) in the middle of the Golden Triangle.

- Contrast your Calls to Action with respect to the rest of the page – use contrasting colors, round vs. rectangular, straight vs. slanted, warm color vs. cold color, big vs. little. Make sure you can spot the Call to Action from 6 feet away.

- Place assurances, testimonials and guarantees in the far-right column

- Place logos to appropriate associations or online companies at the bottom of the page to show credibility – Verisign, BBB Online Reliability, certified by…, Alexa rank (if good), powerseller, live support, credit cards supported, open 24hours a day, Hacker Safe, as seen in Entrepreneur Magazine, Chamber of Commerce, etc.

- Don’t place external links on a landing page. Just allow them the option to proceed into completing the form and converting into a customer.

- Place privacy policies on the landing page. This instills confidence.

- Think of the Amazon.com website. Note their Call to Action is the hotspot at the top-right of all pages – add to cart, one click ordering, etc. This may also apply to you.

Writing Style and Content

- Spend time on your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and place it into the center of the Golden Triangle. A UVP is the core differentiation of a company’s product or service from those of competitors. A complete UVP will describe the market and a company’s competitors and the key difference between competitors and your own company. For instance, of you’re selling DNA Testing, you can promote your price, accuracy, and the number of conditions that your genetic testing company can detect.

- Ensure that you don’t have big paragraphs. Visitors tend to scan pages instead of reading all of the text on them.

- Write using headers above paragraphs that summarize the following text.

- Use bullets where possible as visitors can quickly scan them. Search engines also prioritize bullets instead of long paragraph text.

- If you want to add a picture, ensure that it is going to reinforce your message. You can easily lose significant sales by having the wrong picture on the landing page.

- If the purpose of the landing page is to provide a whitepaper or article then create an image for the paper with enlarged text like the one below and place it on the page:

The Form

- Keep the number of fields on the form as small as possible. This is critical in getting them to complete the form.

- Add a Comments textbox asking for the visitor’s input. It can be key to qualifying leads. Those that complete this form with the services they are looking for should be contacted immediately. Here are some requests you can use for this Comments box:

- What is biggest problem that you need to solve now?

- What is the purpose of your project?

- Please list your goals for this project.

- How can we help you?

- In case the visitor doesn’t complete the Comments textbox on the first page, add a 2nd page with only a Comments textbox on it requesting the visitor’s comments again. Tell them that if they complete the Comments box now then they will receive an extra free white paper that is relevant to the same visitor. These visitor comments are important.

- Have the visitor check a box that says something like “YES! Send me the free white paper that will change my life.” It is the psychological method of coercing them into completing the rest of the form.

- Prominently list the benefits of completing the form. It is major validation. Make sure to write the benefits in terms of the user’s benefits instead of the features of your product or service.

- Ensure you save the form information into a database and send emails out as soon as the form is completed so you can immediately contact the visitor. The lead’s effectiveness drops dramatically as time goes by. Contacting a lead within minutes is ideal.

Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid

- Graphics or text unrelated to the offer – limit copy to only the point of the landing page

- Long forms with unneeded fields – limit your form to what is absolutely essential

- Difficult to read fonts

- Navigation off of the landing page

- Placing important persuasive copy below the fold

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Copyright © 2006 Jayde Online, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Submitted by Kay Frenzer, Senior Account Executive, Submitawebsite

What is a blog, you ask? A blog is simply a content delivery system, in the form of an online journal (weblog).

Because blogs require minimal technical savvy and little or no money, you can be at the forefront of a growing trend and promote your web site at the same time.

Once you’ve got it set up and running (see resources below), updates take about the same time as writing and sending an e-mail.

• Blogs are rich in content and as a result rank high in search engines. Blogs can help your page rank and SERP.
• When you talk to your audience in a blog, you are filling the search engines’ databases with relevant keywords – relevant because most of us search for the words or phrases we use daily.
• In a blog you speak like a real, living person, directly and using words you would use in a conversation. You talk to your visitors, reaching them on a personal level, humanizing your web site.
• Blogs have become a strategic business communication tool; in one study the blog increased average time on a site by 60%.

What to Blog About

Write about what you know. Write about the subject of your web site – what you see happening in the real estate market, new features about your product, interesting facets of the service you offer, or about news events that involve your product/service.

Tips on Writing and Maintaining Your Blog:

1. Consistency: Post to your blog on a regular basis.
2. Write good headlines: Titles are everything! Make your headline informative and use keywords.
3. Use keywords: Pepper the post with keywords and phrases that will be attractive to search engines.
4. Link like crazy: Make keywords into links. Link to products or services on your site. Always link to information that clarifies or gives background on information and opinions in your post. For instance, if you’re blogging about real estate in Scottsdale, send a link to a relevant site.
5. Be direct: Keep your copy short, lively and interesting. Omit all unnecessary words.
6. Keep your sense of humor: Your writing should be light and casual – don’t take yourself too seriously.
7. Use bullet points: Many people skim and only read headlines. Does your content make sense to them?
8. Use subheads: Even in a short post, use subheads every few sentences. Remember, white space is your friend.
9. Images and media: You can include images and short movies in your blog to make it more interesting.
10. One subject per post: Most blog posts are rather short, and they’re often about one subject, which means high keyword density.
11. Edit, edit, edit: Blogs are archived online, and anything you write will be there forever and ever. So think before you write, and edit before you hit “submit.”
12. Ask others to link to your blog: Place a link on your blog so others can add you to social networks. Use Socializer and you will need only one link to reach all social bookmark sites, such as del.icio.us and digg.
    

Blog Resources

If you’re wondering where to start, here are a few helpful sites.

• Google’s Blogger – Free, easy to set up and use. You can maintain your blog on the site or ftp it to your web site.
• Type Pad – Paid service, but possibly the best. 30-day free trial.
  
• Wordpress – Free and very popular – lots of good features.
• Bloglines – Web-based aggregator.
• Blog Search Engine
• Blog City – Free with paid upgrade available.
• Blogger Talk Forum

Kay Frenzer – Senior Account Executive

SEO Chat
Search Engine Friendly URLs
Contributed by Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy
2006-10-04

Search engines prefer static URLs to dynamic URLs. This article explains the difference, tells why search engines don’t like dynamic URLs, and shows you some ways to make your dynamic URLs look like static ones.

There are many reasons a webmaster may want to change the look and feel of a web page address. They may have dynamic URLs that need to be search engine-friendly, the page may have moved, the whole site may have moved to a new domain name, or they need to be better for users to view as interesting in the SERPs for more traffic and searchability. Whatever a webmaster’s reasons for changing the way a URL is handled, there are definitely good ways to do this in regard to SEO, and then there are some bad ones, too.

In this article I want to look at a few ways you can utilize a few simple server tools and redirection elements to provide your site with static-looking search engine friendly URLs.

Dynamic URLs

There are two types of URLs: dynamic and static. A dynamic URL is a page address that results from the search of a database-driven web site or the URL of a web site that runs a script. In contrast to static URLs, in which the contents of the web page stay the same unless the changes are hard-coded into the HTML, dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site’s database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database.

Because of the way that dynamic URLs are created, they sometimes create nightmares in the area of search engine optimization (SEO). Search engines do not like to index dynamic URLs. There are multiple reasons for this, one of them being the non-standard characters like ?, &, %, =, and others in the URL. Many times, anything after the character is disregarded. For example, we may have URLs that look something like this:

http://www.somesite.com/index.php?forumid&=120957w&=0404200620%search
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?forumid&=143212x&=0617200720%search
http://www.somesite.com/index.php?forumid&=236718b&=1127200420%search

Well, you get the idea. So if the part of the URL after the first character is disregarded, the URLs look like this to a search engine:

http://www.somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com/index.php
http://www.somesite.com/index.php

Any URL that is viewed this way to a search engine is going to essentially be nothing more than a bunch of duplicate URLs. And we all know how much search engines just love duplicate URLs. (Okay, I was being sarcastic, as they don’t). They would much rather index a URL that looks like this:

http://www.somesite.com/index.php/seo_tools_page.html

In other areas, many times dynamic content is hard to spider, especially if it is pulled from the database with client-side code like JavaScript. If you can’t view the page source and view the content of a web page, there is a very good chance that a search engine spider will not be able to either. While search engines are getting much better at indexing dynamic URLs, they would still prefer static URLs.

So the challenge of dynamic URLs is clear: how do you keep the dynamic site without compromising the indexing of your pages with regard to SEO? By creating search engine-friendly (SEF) URLs, that’s how! Let’s look at a few methods we want to be familiar with in our quest for SEF URLs. Quite frankly, it may sound like a daunting mission, but it’s certainly not a mission impossible.

The first and most obvious way you could do this would be to rename every page in your site to reflect a static URL with keywords and make those pages static. If you have only a few pages in your site, then you probably don’t need a dynamic site in the first place, so this would be fine. But if you have a dynamic site that produces hundreds or even thousands of URLs, then doing this by hand is an unreasonable task to undertake. So you will either need to figure out a different way to accomplish the same thing, or find a tool to do it for you.

Using .htaccess

In the next couple of items I’ll explain a bit further. The .htaccess file is basically a set of instructions in a simple text file with the extension .htaccess (there is no file name) on the server to give parameters to the browser when a request is made, put quite simply. More specifically, it is a web server configuration file that contains commands known by the server that tell the server how to behave in certain instances. The place you would utilize mod_rewrite or other redirect-type tools available to you will most likely be in your .htaccess file.

Some of the most common uses of an htaccess file include the capability to restrict access to certain files or directories on the Internet (or intranet) through password protection. Additionally htaccess is used to automatically redirect users, ban or allow certain IP addresses access to the server, and to call a custom designed 404 error page rather than the standard error 404 file that usually appears in your browser. Apache Web servers and other NCSA compliant Web servers can use htaccess.

Most search engines, especially all major ones, will not index pages with query strings because it may also indicate that the content of the page is not static and it prevents spamming to some extent. There’s multiple ways to disguise the query string though. The easiest and probably most used involves mod_rewrite on Apache servers.

If your server is hosted on a Linux or Unix (*nix) server, then you may have access to Apache’s module called mod_rewrite. This is a nifty module indeed. What it does is return to the browser a URL that appears to be the actual web address of the page, when in fact the URL itself is not being changed in any way. It’s more of a mirror effect.

When a request comes in to a server for the new static URL through mod_rewrite, the Apache module redirects the URL internally to the old, dynamic URL, while still appearing to all the world, search engines included, as the static URL. The web server compares the URL requested by the client with the search pattern in the individual rules. For example, when someone requests the SEF URL:

http://www.somesite.com/index-forumid/120957w/0404200620%search.htm

The server looks for and compares this static-looking URL to what information is listed in the .htaccess file, such as:

Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule index-forumid (.*)/(.*)/(.*).htm$ index.php?forumid=$1&=$2&=$3

So what if you are on a Microsoft IIS server? Well, there is another way to accomplish this using code, but it’s far more painful to use than mod_rewrite. But it can certainly be done. Unfortunately for the time being, that is outside the scope of this article.

301 vs. 302 Redirects

Redirects can either be good or bad as far as SEF URLs are concerned. 302 redirects are temporary redirects. These tell a search engine spider that you’ve moved this page only temporarily and to index it later when you have moved it to a new home for good. While this may not be what you actually had in mind to
do, that’s how a search engine reads a 302 redirect. Use instead a 301 permanent redirect. It’s the 301 redirect that informs the search engine of the new URL and to start indexing it instead of the old URL. 301 redirects are also fairly seamless, so your visitors will also probably not be aware of the move, and if they’ve bookmarked a particular page, this will be especially helpful.

If you are not willing or don’t know how to write a script to reprogram your dynamic URLs into static ones, then you are in luck, because there are many tools available on the web that will help you produce the code you need to enable you to create SEF URLs. You might want to consider a Windows code generator if you are on an MS IIS server.

Incorporating Keywords

You may be thinking to yourself, “Well, okay, the rewritten URL looks a bit better, but it doesn’t contain any keywords, and certainly doesn’t mean anything to me or my visitors. Now what?” Search engines are 66% to 85% more likely to list your web page in its top ten results if you utilize a keyword or phrase in the URL. So not only should you master the techniques of creating SEF URLs, you should also try to get a few highly targeted keywords placed in that SEF URL. Now, we’re just making this whole thing too complicated, right? Not necessarily. Keep in mind that it is up to you to decide how your URL will ultimately look.

So while we are creating our SEF URL, we simply plant a few of the keywords into the code for redirection or rewrite. Let me show you a little bit of what I mean. Let’s say we want our URL to look like this:

http://www.somesite.com/index.php/seo_tools_page.html

We’ll have to take our earlier code and expand it a bit more, make it URL specific and cover multiple parameters. We may just need to add a few tweaks to incorporate the keywords where we want them. You will probably do better to find information on the specific code to do this by doing a search for mod_rewrite, as it is outside the scope of this article. Essentially there are three key steps to any mod_rewrite directive:

RewriteRule thisfile changedfilename

There are clearly more things that will go into all of this that I haven’t covered, nor do I have the time and in the case of mod_rewrite, the knowledge to do everything you need to create the perfect SEF URLs. This article is not necessarily intended to give you all the specific instructions to utilize mod_rewrite completely effectively on all of your pages, for example, but it’s a fair start.

Depending on what part of the world you’re trying to reach, it’s well worth it to optimize for MSN. So what does Microsoft’s search engine like? Keep reading to find out.

If there is anything that will make the SERPs of MSN different from that of Google, Yahoo! and other search engines, it is its bias towards frequently updated web pages. This bias is fortunately a positive bias, and on its search engine help page, they actually indicate that pages which are frequently updated will receive higher rankings than sites that do not update regularly. Check out http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm for its official recommendations concerning general MSN optimization.

So here is the lowdown on MSN optimization, but the freshness has to key in with other things that MSN considers important. First we will look at “defining freshness.”

Defining Freshness

Being fresh is like going to the beauty shop and wearing new clothes. It is not something that many websites are known for.

Freshness simply means regularly updating your web site’s content. By regular I mean at least monthly, and if necessary weekly; by regular I mean activity on your site. In tune with MSN, freshness means updating your content to fit in with your web site’s description, in line with your SEO keyword strategy. Updating with no attention paid to your SEO keyword strategy is not recommended (that is me being polite), and will not help with MSN.

Freshness is about content, content, and more content. Freshness is about theme-based pages and pages that have a relatively high key word density for the search term.

Their emphasis on freshness will help MSN give the searcher high quality results and results which are valuable, while weeding out billions of other web sites that simply don’t offer good content. This is the main focus of most search engines since they are aware that consistently good results on their pages will result in repeat users (which is what we all want).

Freshness will affect both MSNbot and Yahoo Slurp since they both crawl the Internet pretty frequently. Yahoo still has the advantage when it comes to regular refreshing; however, freshness has not been noted to affect rankings on Yahoo. On MSN it does. And the difference in crawling time is only for URLs in Yahoo’s Sitematch program.

I mean, this freshness thing sounds like work! You may actually have to write once a month, and it must be relevant content. After all, Google is the biggest search engine and it doesn’t demand that your sites be fresh (it also takes forever to index your pages; Yahoo, on the other hand, just wants to bankrupt you with their PFI/PPC program). So why should you bother regularly updating your site?

The Giant Called Microsoft

When you say MSN, you should remember that you are actually saying Microsoft, a company which has proven itself to be a master at traditional and guerrilla marketing techniques. Microsoft took over the browser market in less than three years with a second rate application and integrated product marketing techniques, riding roughshod over Netscape, AOL Time Warner and the combined might of the European Union and United States anti-trust departments (who retaliated with various face-saving fines and verdicts).

I mean this is a corporation that thrives on entering a market and grabbing Goliath market share: Word took out the word processing market, and Excel did the same to the spread sheet market. Based on history alone I would expect MSN to have 59 percent of the search engine market in three years. Unfortunately Google is already there, and Google seems to be the new Microsoft.

Number One Already?

In early June, disturbing reports filtered down from some UK associates to me that MSN is the number one search engine in the UK (I was disturbed because I wasn’t paying much attention to MSN then). This was shown to be because all new computers sold in the UK have Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer has MSN preloaded as its home page (does this tactic sound familiar?). Microsoft is already using its traditional integrated product marketing approach to shove MSN down the throats of unsuspecting users. Combine this with its PR stunts and you have a take over already in progress.

I could summarize MSN optimization basics in one word: content. But then you won’t be satisfied. MSN wants key word rich content, unbroken HTML links so that the MSN crawler MSNbot will be able crawl effectively, well ordered HTML, and a hierarchical structure with good use of your H1 and H2 tags (this enables the crawler to view descriptions down the page).

This sounds harder than it actually is; basically all you have to do is avoid heavy pages and put descriptive content on top of your page. The issues are the same for all search engines, but you should keep all this in mind when updating your websites content (and in some cases, overhauling your entire website).

Ideally you should have a site map, since the crawler cannot crawl through links embedded in graphics or animations. You should also ensure that all the pages on your site are close together to help the MSN spider crawl your entire site.

MSNbot also obeys the robots exclusion standards.

Keep all this in mind every time you “freshen up” your content. These may seem like small things, but as chaos theory says, “a butterfly flapping its wings in Brunei, leads to a hurricane in Florida.” Small changes could mean the difference between effective updating and updating merely for the sake of looking good (but the point of looking good is really to get good ratings, right?)

Update Your Description Meta Tag

When you update your content, you should also update your description meta tag, since the MSNbot uses part of it in composing a short description of the site. This short description is displayed when MSN displays its SERPs. Every time the MSNbot crawls, it indexes updated content, and generates a new description for it.

To practice freshness for MSN, you have to have theme-based pages, one theme per page. You can’t write just anything; to get high rankings, you have to write better. Emphasize quality. You must write effective theme-based content. Let your information be unique and valuable; write your content with your keywords in mind, aiming for a keyword density of about seven for every hundred words. Your first paragraph must describe the content of the web page. It should contain a higher keyword content than other pages.

Where to Get Unique Material

You may actually have to write most of the content yourself. If you don’t and you collect from article databases, ensure that the material matches the theme you want and that it adequately addresses the key word density you would require. It may be best, however, to get unique content, by getting writers who will only write for your site.

Your focus should be on content, but sales copy can also be optimized, with the same focus on keyword density and a single theme. One god thing about optimizing for MSN is that it may let a lot of sites stop optimizing by using links, and focus on writing great conten
t. To do this you do not have to have formal sales training; you just need to write like you speak, making sure you repeat your keywords.

You must honestly do this and not resort to practices such as keyword spamming, or invisible and tiny text; remember, MSN wants repeat users, to help it gain market share. And to do this it must give the best results around. Help MSN do this, and you are certain to be rewarded. However, be a villainous SEO practitioner (read: the dude in the black hat) and you face very short-lived success at best, and banning at worst.

Avoid fancy, graphics heavy web page updates if you are serious about high rankings (that means that during a slow month, you can’t put a product catalog on your home page and claim you have optimized!).

A theme based site is primarily focused within a broader topic. For example, if your site’s focus is golf, like http://www.igogolf.com/, then you should divide the content into pages based on focused themes: one page may discuss players, another page tournaments, the third golfing equipment, and so on. Then the page on players can have a link to a page on Tiger Woods, and before you know it, someone types “tiger” in the query box, and your site appears in the top ten listings. This is especially likely to happen if you focused your keywords on “golf,” “Tiger,” and “Masters,” so watch your keywords.

Without focus, you have no theme, and MSN SERPs give high rankings to particular pages.

A Time For Change

Sometimes I search and see websites that were last updated in the late nineties. Many times the information is still timely, but nearly as often it is not. MSN search is a wake up call, especially if MSN ends up with a large market share. That could happen. The company offers a different approach, with its quick indexing, and by not focusing on how much it is paid before its bot crawls and indexes your site (unlike Yahoo), and Microsoft’s legendary marketing strategy. Optimizing specific parts of your website particularly for content, and regularly updating, would enable you to take advantage of MSN, while providing value for your customers and not losing rankings on other search engines.

Written by Akinola Akintomide 9/12/2006

Yahoo! has announced that it is integrating Sitemaps into Y! Merchant stores. Starting 6/28/2006 Yahoo! merchants can automatically create a Sitemap file for their stores and share information about their site with Google and other search engines to improve their visibility online. With this integration, Yahoo! merchants can also easily verify ownership of their stores — so they can create a Google Sitemaps account and benefit from the additional reports and tools that show them Google’s view of their site. For more information go to: http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2006/06/new-feature-sitemap-for-your-store/