Landing Pages - are they important for SEO? You bet!

A landing page is one of the most important factors in SEO and if they are not right you are missing out on higher rankings.

What is a Landing Page? It’s the page that shows up from the search engines when people do a search. In most cases this will be your homepage. There are various forms of writing the URL of your homepage which can depend upon many things, such as whether it’s HTML, PHP or ASP based. We will take each case one by one and mention how to develop a landing page strategy.

HTML. If your site’s home page is index.html or index.htm then check in Google using your top keyword and see how it is indexing your site. More than likely it is showing up as “http://www.adomain.com” so you know that your index.html or index.htm is your Landing Page. If it appears as http://adomain.com then it’s still OK ... just take a mental note to omit the 3ws.

Every time you setup a link to your site, always use the http://www or the http:// and never change it. These are different in Google’s eyes so stick with one.

When people are writing an internal navigation menu they sometimes, lazily, write /indexl.html under the home button. Bad move: this renders as “http://www.adomain.com/index.html” and this is not the landing page of “http://www.adomain.com”. Technically, it is the same page – sure – but ! it’s not the same address.

The way to overcome this is to use the full URL of your landing page as your landing page.

PHP. For these sites the homepage is index.php. Links on your site that point back to your homepage should use the full URL.

ASP. Default.asp is the homepage on windows ASP but we will still use the full URL when we want to send people back to the homepage.

I tend to use the homepage address, in the form of “ http://www.adomain.com” as my internal link back.

Some people use the “/” to go back to the homepage but I’d like to hear if anyone is using that.

Multi-zone Landing Pages become a part of your strategy if you have multiple sections (that are not really connected) that are on one domain name. We will be discussing these shortly.