Seth Godin posted a very comprehensive explanation of landing pages today. Accomplishing what Seth talks about is pretty straightforward for static sites that rely on Google Adwords for traffic/customers. in this case, everything is more or less predictable and controllable. It is even more or less easy for sites getting traffi from both search and ads. Now picture this situation: your an SEO blogger/blogging SEO (like many of us). People come to your site from different sources:
- search (and thank God there is Google Blogsearch which lets you squeeze in even with a blog on a domain that’s not in Google’s index yet)
- external links that are likely to drive traffic (as in, there are links for search engines and links for traffic, ideally they should coincide but that’s not always the case)
- RSS feeds
The purpose of your blog is building reputation and driving traffic – but you need to convert the traffic as well. Every blog post becomes a landing page, and the goals it should accomplish are not only “Get a visitor to learn something, which could even include posting a comment or giving you some sort of feedback†as is with blogs normally, but as an SEO looking for clients you pursue a greater goal of getting your visitors to trust you enough to order your SEO services – and this just canot be accomplished without proper navigation on every page telling the visitor what other opportunities they have on your site. You might also have other pages that get linked to and receive traffic and thus become your landing pages (e.g. tools, competitions, polls, whatever your linkbait is) – the navigation should be consistent all through the site. I sometimes get visitors coming to the blog and ending up using the tools I use on this site – and I make sure wherever they are they can find their way around the site through consistent navigation.