SEO and Landing Pages: The Foundation Of Online Marketing

An article by Buzz Internet Staff    No Comments

With all the talk recently of Google making big changes to their web crawling algorithms, the biggest of which seem to be aimed at stopping SEO abusers from out ranking the legitimate businesses which customers are looking for, we figured it would be a good idea to give you a brief overview of the proper use of SEO and keywords to help keep your business from being mistaken for one of the bad guys.

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is basically the art of understanding the algorithms that search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo use to determine and rank the relevance of a web page and then using that understanding to get your webpage to rank as high as possible for the keywords that you are targeting.

In the early days of the internet, and to a lesser extent today, websites would put a huge block of random words at the bottom of their pages to try and fool the search engines, and get their page to rank high for as many keywords as possible, even if those words had nothing to do with the actual content of the site. Thankfully, the search engines quickly wised up to this and made that method obsolete.

Today, smart marketers choose specific, target keywords that the company’s potential clients are likely to search for. For example, if you owned a window company in Miami, and we were building a website for you, we could and would target terms like “windows”, “window replacement” but there are going to be thousands of companies around the world using those same terms, which makes them rather inefficient. We have to be able to think about it from the point of view of a Miami home owner who is in need of new windows, they might start out searching those terms, but one they realize there are millions of results from all over the world, they’re going to try to narrow it down. The most common way consumers narrow down a search like that is to add the location they’re looking for to the search term. This is why we would focus our efforts on search terms such as “windows Miami” and “window replacement Miami” which still include our original search terms and will rank for them, but also targets the narrowed search which will have less competition and a higher percentage of the searchers will be in your target audience.

Landing Pages

Landing pages should be the foundation of any well produced marketing plan. A landing page is a highly SEO’d page which you use as a base to link off to the rest of your website. This allows for highly concentrated and very specific SEO terms on a page, allowing it to look very favorable to the web crawlers and increasing its ranking in the results.

The biggest advantage to properly built landing pages is that you can use an unlimited number of them, each targeting a specific search term and all of them linking back to the content of your main site. This essentially allows you to bypass the classic problem of trying balance whether to focus on highly SEO’d content to increase traffic or high quality content to seal the deal with people who have already found your site. You have the best of both worlds with highly SEO’d landing pages driving new traffic with high search rankings and linking consumers to your main page which is filled with high quality content to keep them there and wanting more.

Want help with your SEO or Landing Pages? Contact Buzz Internet today.