Search Engine Optimization

A landing page is a sales page that is focused on a single idea and is designed to communicate with prospects that have short attention spans. Landing pages are an inexpensive and effective way to boost sales online. Independent of your main website, landing pages exist for the sole purpose of converting prospects into buyers.

Many online marketers struggle with creating landing pages that convert well. Follow these 8 tips to improve the conversion rates of your landing pages.

1. Use a single column

Landing pages that use a single column and don’t have a navigation bar are the most effective because they allow users to move through the conversion process quickly. If there is more than one column on your landing page, users will be distracted and their eyes will wander all over the page, hurting your conversion rates.

2. Focus on a single offer

Landing pages are supposed to deliver a targeted message. Landing pages with multiple, competing offers distract and confuse prospects. Studies show that the more complex a landing page, the lower the conversion rate! Build highly targeted landing pages for every product or service you offer.

3. Optimize for scanning

People who use the internet have short attention spans, so if your landing page contains large blocks of text, many prospects will click away upon reaching it. To optimize your landing page for scanning and enhance its readability, break up text into digestible sections and use italics, bold, headings, and bullet points.

4. Use short, simple forms

Reduce the length of the sign-up form on your landing page by only asking prospects for vital info, such as their name and email address. Lengthy, complex sign-up forms intimidate prospects and drastically reduce your landing page’s conversion rate. To establish trust, feature your privacy policy in just a few lines near the sign-up form.

5. Keep landing page copy concise and focused

Make sure your landing page copy is concise, direct, and to-the-point. Moreover, your copy should highlight the benefits of your product/service and focus on how it solves your customer’s problems. If you’re having trouble crafting copy or your landing page, hire a professional copywriter.

6. Personalize your landing page

Add your photo and signature to your landing page, if possible. Personalizing your landing pages lets prospects know that you’re a real person and not a scammer who’s just out to get their money.

7. Invoke trust

Display logos of websites or media outlets where you’ve been mentioned, awards your company has won, accreditations you’ve earned, and professional associations you’re a member of to invoke trust and convey credibility.

8. Keep it simple

Your landing page does not need to talk, flash, or move. The simpler your landing page is, the better it will perform. A simply designed page that guides the user’s eyes to the “Sign up now” button is all you need. Just make sure that the call to action on your landing page is clear and tells users exactly what action you’d like them to take, whether it’s to fill out the contact form, click the red button, or call a specific telephone number. Make your call to action as explicit as possible.

One of the most common myths prevalent in the internet marketing industry is the myth of the duplicate content penalty. The truth is that there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. Search engines don’t like duplicate content, but they don’t specifically penalize websites that have it.

Duplicate content is a problem because it affects the user experience. When someone searches for a query on a search engine, they want to see several different web pages or websites in the results. A search engine has failed to do its job if a user searches for information and receives pages upon pages of results that provide the same basic information. Search engines want to provide ten diverse results on each page, not ten results from different URLs that contain the same content.

To prevent duplicate content from being listed in their results, search engines filter out information they already know about. The only time search engines actually penalize a website is if they try to trick the search engines on purpose. The average webmaster will never be slapped with a penalty by the search engines, and anyone who does get penalized is probably well aware of what they did to deserve it.

Things that will get you in trouble with the search engines include scraping content from other sites and republishing content without adding any additional value. According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, if you want to avoid getting your content filtered out by Google, you should avoid creating multiple pages, domains, and subdomains with duplicate content, as well as creating “cookie cutter” affiliate sites that have little to no original content. Contrary to popular belief, having multiple URLs on the same domain point to the same content does not cause penalties.

According to Google, “Duplicate content on a site is not grounds for action on that site unless it appears that the intent of the duplicate content is to be deceptive and manipulate search engine results. If your site suffers from duplicate content issues, and you don’t follow the advice listed above, we do a good job of choosing a version of the content to show in our search results.”

Many webmasters are concerned about republishing articles from other sources on their site because they think that this could get their sites penalized, but reprinting someone’s articles on your site is no biggie. The worst thing that could happen is that the articles won’t show in the results for relevant searches. But there’s also a good chance that they will.

Whether your original articles are republished on other sites with or without your permission, there’s no need to fret. If your content gets scraped, the search engines will be able to determine which site originally posted the content and which site scraped it. And if you allow webmasters to republish your content with attribution, it will be beneficial to your site because the more sites that host your article, the more credibility you’ll build and the more link juice your site will get.

If the sites that republish your articles show up in the search results instead of your own site, then so be it. People who stumble upon the articles will still be able to click on the link in the article bio in order to reach your website. In some cases, the search engines do show duplicate articles in their results, though they eventually filter out the duplicates and list only one version of an article.

So, don’t fear the so-called duplicate content penalty because it doesn’t actually exist. Search engines are not out to punish you; they’re simply trying to provide their users with a variety of results. As long as you publish original, high quality content on your site and don’t republish content without permission, you have nothing to worry about.

Many webmasters are obsessed with leaving comments on dofollow blogs. They frequent dofollow blog directories to find blogs on which to comment, purchase blog commenting services that leave hundreds of comments on relevant blogs with keyword anchor text, or use software that auto-fill blogs with generic comments. These webmasters don’t bother to read the blog articles they comment on; they simply paraphrase the articles in their comments so that the comments don’t look like spam.

Quick Backlinks from Blog Comments: Are They Worth It?

Blog commenting is one of the fastest and easiest ways to build backlinks to your website, but is getting those links really worth the time and effort? Sure, links from blog comments have some value in the eyes of search engines, but they’re worth little in comparison to “editorial” links. Editorial links are high quality link recommendations contained within relevant articles/blog posts. When you receive a link recommendation from a blogger, it could have a snowball effect and attract even more high quality links from other bloggers. On the other hand, the chances of attracting high quality links and exposure are slim to none if all you do is leave generic comments on dofollow blogs.

That being said, for websites that you are not trying to build a reputable brand around, such as small affiliate sites and niche sites monetized by Adsense, dofollow blog commenting can be an effective link-building and traffic generation tool. But if you would like to build a strong reputation and brand image around your website, don’t leave generic comments on dofollow blogs. In fact, ignore the dofollow and nofollow attributes altogether.

Tips for Maximizing the Results of Your Blog Commenting Efforts

To achieve the highest return on investment possible from blog commenting, look for relevant blogs that have decent-sized audiences and comment on them with the intention of extracting more valuable links from them down the line. To do this, leave blog comments that contribute to the discussion. Use blog commenting as an opportunity to share your thoughts about a particular article or ask intelligent questions. Before submitting a comment, ask yourself, “Am I adding value to the conversation?” If you approach blog commenting in this fashion, it can be an effective relationship-building tool. Bloggers/webmasters will appreciate your input and be more likely to link to your website in the future if you make an effort to leave thoughtful comments on their sites.

Furthermore, when you leave valuable comments on blog posts and articles in your niche, it helps you drive high quality, targeted traffic to your website. These casual visitors may also link to your website if it features high quality content. In addition, blog commenting enables you to build authority in your niche, but only if you contribute to the discussion. If you leave generic comments that say things like, “Great article! Thank you for that,” or use a keyword instead of a real name, you will only build a reputation as a spammer.

In the long run, approaching blog commenting as a relationship building tool will provide bigger returns than approaching it as a quick way to get links. Dozens of generic comments on dofollow blogs may bring you immediate backlinks, but they won’t help you build your reputation, drive quality traffic to your website, or receive high quality link recommendations from bloggers and webmasters.

If you want to maximize the returns that blog commenting brings, ignore the nofollow and dofollow attributes and focus on adding value in the comments sections of blogs. Slowly but surely, you’ll build your reputation, attract high quality editorial links, and build beneficial relationships with webmasters/bloggers.

Are there negative things being said about your business on the internet? If you aren’t sure, the first thing you need to do is set up Google Alerts. It’s free and emails you periodically to let you know when your name or company name is mentioned by someone on the internet.

Knowing what is being said about your company on the web is important because it allows you to react quickly to negative feedback, as well as resolve issues that could cost you business. Think about it: when prospects search for information about your company and find negative results, they may choose to go with one of your competitors instead. The easiest and fastest way to control your online reputation is via social media.

Social media websites have lots of authority on the web and therefore rank well in the search engines. So, whether you want to prevent negative results from appearing in the first place or push some negative results off of the first page, creating profiles for your company on various social media websites is an effective strategy for controlling what prospects see when they search for your business’s name on major search engines.

Getting Started

First things first, you should make sure that you have a corporate website that ranks for your company name and any other trade names you’d like to protect. Then, you should start a company blog on your website so that you have a way to engage with your customers and provide positive information about your company that ranks well in the search engines. By doing these two things, you will theoretically be able to control what shows up in the first and second slots in the search engine results.

In order to control the search engine results that follow, start out by creating profiles on the four big social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Make sure that you use the exact name that you would like to rank for in these profiles. There are hundreds of other social media sites out there that you can sign up for, but these are the most important ones. If you’d like to develop a presence on other networks to decrease the likelihood of negative search results appearing on the first page of results for your target keyword, then creating profiles on several other social media sites is a good idea. To save you time and hassle, there are companies, such as Knowem.com, that will register you on a number of social media sites for around 50 cents per site.

Make Sure That Your Profiles Are Complete

If you want your social media profiles to make a positive contribution to your online reputation, make sure that they include avatars, bios, etc. The more information you provide, the better because then the search engines will have more text to crawl. Don’t just create an account and let it sit there collecting dust. Interact and engage with your community to give your profiles a meaningful presence.

Use tools like the aforementioned Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about your brand in social media. Also, you’ll have to figure out how you’re going to deal with negative commentary about your brand besides through “controlling” search engine results with online reputation management tactics. Generally, the best way to deal with negative feedback is to go directly to the person who made the negative comment and politely ask them to withdraw it and find out if there is anything you can do to fix the problem.

Creating and managing your presence in social media is not the only aspect of online reputation management, but it’s an important one. Even if your business is very small or your company still doesn’t have any negative search results to speak of, it’s a good idea to start building your social media profiles now to prevent online reputation management problems in the future.