A common occurrence and necessity is to spend more time working on the home page compared to other pages of a website. Many experts will tell you that you can’t forget your other content, and smartly so. Search engines like Google sees each page of your site uniquely, and your contact page could actually bring in more visitors than your home page. This is all often the case, but I wanted to know by how much.

So I did a little study using Google Analytics reports from ten different sites. The sites are completely random in industry, and in type. Continue reading »

 

I’m sure you have seen a million of these kind of pages, it’s a basic landing page promoting a product. No extra fluff on the site, just the required information to make a sale. Check out this xbox 360 repair guide landing page though, there is one thing different about it. Clue? It’s a blog.

My first clue that this landing page was not normal was the volume of traffic it received. My SEOBook toolbar showed me it was getting at least 2,000 uniques a month, and I thought that was pretty good for a basic landing page. In fact that’s better than a lot of websites get in general. Then I did a little more digging using Compete.com’s info and they indicated most of its referral traffic was coming from Google. What does this mean? It means if you are looking for the xbox 360 red ring of death fix you are going to find that site on the first page of Google’s results. It also means it had been extremely well optimized for search engines. Continue reading »

 

I got a pretty unusual spam comment on this blog the other day, and it got me to thinking about call to actions on landing pages.

Spammers haven’t been known for their brilliant call to actions, and this one is no exception. Visit my blog, and if you report this as spam, you will die. Yeah, I will jump right on that, and visit your link right away. Not, and delete. Continue reading »

Aug 132009
 

Every morning I like to read blogs and forums. Here are the top three I found of value today. Continue reading »

 

About a month ago, I took a good look at my site, compared it to others, and went crazy with the delete button. I also brought a couple items back to life. Here is what I did a month ago that has made: my page views increase by 27%, pages per visit increase by 12%, my bounce rate decrease by 1%, and an increase in my average time on site per session by 56%!

Usually it’s better to make small measurable changes to a site, but enough was enough. My site needed a bigger change. It needed a change at least for me. Continue reading »

Nov 262008
 

I was doing a review of this credit card processing site this morning, and saw something many of us don’t take advantage of. Making every page a landing page. CardAccept sells credit card equipment, and it’s easy to tell that simply by looking at any of their pages on the site.

Every page they have on the site sells, even on their contact page. It’s not plastered with the normal “Buy Now” junk, or filled with highlighted text everywhere screaming at you. They simply have a basic, very short form that asks the perspective visitor to fill out the information to get them started with their equipment. It’s highly visible, above the fold, and is consistently placed throughout the site. The form is also complimented by a great big 800 number found in the header directly above. I have said it many times before, having that phone number obvious and in the header will drastically improve credibility and sales.

Having a landing page is a good idea when you are trying to sell something specific, especially on a large site where a visitor could very easily be distracted. Landing pages are also specifically designed to move the visitor to complete the desired action. Ocassionaly though, you have site such as CardAccepts, where the site itself if a landing page, or should I say landing site. The owners have clearly considered the purpose of the site, to get prospects to fill out that form, and did not deviate. Great job!