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What's Going on With Your Landing Page?

While surfing the net over the weekend I landed on a couple of websites that reminded me of the importance of a good landing page. I clicked on these sites because the Title and Description in search results promised to provide what I was looking for, but once I landed there, all hope was gone.

I could not find a hint of what was promised and on one of the sites I had to navigate through at least 50 units of Adsense before seeing a glimpse of relevant information, and I quickly clicked off and moved on.

The landing page is so crucial for visitor retention, not to mention their return. A landing page is the page that visitors first land on when visiting your site either from search results, or from any links to your site. Usually it's the home page, but it's actually any page that is linked to and from where visitors can get to your website.

Also, it is important to realize that while we, who are webmasters, understand websites and navigation on a deeper level, you always have to assume that your visitors are complete novices and they need obvious and clear indication of what your site is about, what's there and how to find what their looking for.

The landing page is really the "first impression" of your site and its content. What is on your landing page?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your website clearly defining what you are offering?

2. Is there some kind of welcome message or post that explains what's there?

3. When visitors land on your page, are they easily able to navigate to different sections and pages within your site?

4. Is the content reflective of the title and description?

5. When they land, are they met with valuable relevant information or do they have to muddle through a ton of adds, like Google Adsense and banners?

If you answered NO to any of these questions then you will have problems with keeping your visitors and obviously they will not return.

Remember that the Internet revolves around the ease of getting information, if a surfer has to jump through a thousand hoops to find what their looking for on your website, believe me, they will not, and why should they? There are millions of other sites where they will find what their looking for with ease.

This is especially true for bloggers, I surfed about a hundred blogs this weekend and found many whose landing pages were just awful. One of which was a high traffic guru blog.

Because blogs do not usually have the same navigation layout as websites, instead of pages they have posts, they should be even more diligent in the landing page layout and navigation; because posts are THE content of a blog and they should be placed at a top spot, with a proper header, like All Posts or Recent Posts where individual post titles are listed for easy access and navigation. A visitor shouldn't have to spend half an hour looking for posts and believe me they will not.

Don't let a bad landing page and navigation set-up affect your online business and Internet marketing efforts.

Article Source: http://www.dummiesguideto.com

Get comprehensive, simple, hands-on and step-by-step Internet Marketing Strategies at Step-by-Step Internet Marketing Guides Blog. One of my best posts: List of 70 + Free Webmaster and SEO Tools.

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