Introduction to Organic Landing Pages
May 16th, 2008 by Court
Once you have a site that’s somewhat established (or one that isn’t for that matter), you should consider adding to its ability to grab search visitors by using organic landing pages. This lesson will teach you what organic landing pages are, and how you can use them to increase the traffic you get from Google and other search engines.
Definition of Organic Landing Pages
This type of a page is created with the basic intention of getting a search engine ranking for a specific keyword, and is one of the basic fundamentals of internet marketing.
There is a ton of debate as to whether this type of page should be written with visitors or search engines in mind. The answer seems pretty easy and obvious to me - it should be written with both in mind.
Creating a landing page that doesn’t have the keyword in the right places would just be stupid and creating a landing page that didn’t make sense or help a visitor is also not a good idea. If a Google engineer came across the page you could be banned or penalized. On the other side of things you could also get a benefit from people naturally linking to a solid page if it helped people that were searching for the information found there.
How to Create a Solid Organic Landing Page
First of all, you need to make sure you get the keyword you’re trying to target into a few strategic locations:
- HTML title tag
- Page URL
- Within the page’s main body of text (near the beginning)
With a static site, you would have to do all this manually. With a WordPress blog this will pretty much happen automatically as long as you have permalinks enabled and use your keyword as the post title and post.
To add to the effect of the page, I usually like to add the keyword multiple times into a few other locations. While these placements are debatable, I have used them and they have worked great for me. Here are the additional locations where I like to use them:
- Tags
- H1 Tag
- Toward the end of the main body of text
As a general rule, you don’t want to ever stuff content with a load of keywords. I find that by creating landing pages that are 500+ words, I can fit my keyword into the text two or three times naturally without making it feel spammy.
If I have the keyword three times in the main body of text (in a blog this would be within the post), in the post title, and in a tag, that gives me five visual occurrences within the body of the document. This means that a person could visually find the keyword five times on the page.
In a 500+ word document, this is sufficient and not overly stuffed.
When I started creating this type of a page, I remember being a little nervous to get started because I didn’t want to do it wrong. As I have grown in experience, I came to understand that it isn’t an exact science. If you follow what’s in this post, you will be just as good at creating solid landing pages as anyone else.
Example Landing Pages
Here are a few landing pages that I have created for your convenience (and to get search traffic for the site):
- How to Make Money at Home
- How to Make Money on the Internet
- Ways for Kids to Make Money
- Ways To Make Money Online
Getting the Actual Ranking with a Landing Page
To the best of my knowledge, the landing page examples I’ve shown above are pretty much as good as it gets. However, this doesn’t mean that I will get an automatic number one ranking. I can have better keyword placement than other sites, but if the other sites have more keyword authority than I have, they will outrank me.
This means that getting an organic landing page to rank well involves two steps:
- Setting the page up properly (this article teaches you how to do this)
- Building links to increase the keyword authority of the page
Conclusion
By finding keywords that are related to your site, and creating solid landing pages, anyone can increase the traffic they get from Google and other search engines.
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
Post to Facebook
StumbleItRelated Posts:
Creating Landing Pages Worthy Of Getting Ranked #1
...
Introduction to Lead Blogging
...
Best Weight Loss Medication
...
Welcome to Court’s Internet Marketing School
...
New Revenue Stream - TheNewsRoom.com
...
Introduction To Link Clusters
...
May 16th, 2008 at 11:42 am
Court this is a great explanation of how to set up the landing pages. I’m curious when you say the additional location of “tags” where you like to use your keywords, which sorts of tags would you include there? Image, href, etc?
May 16th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
Good question Monetizer. I actually meant Technorati style tags - the type you would use on a WordPress blog post.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
It might help to add tags in the other places also. A graphic with a filename with the keyword can get picked up by Google image search also.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:54 am
I try to make each of my pages good landing pages simply by making the URL, title, and content all contain my keywords, and of course by being of benefit to the visitor. If your posts contain valuable information, with a relevant title and url, then you are on the right track.
If you do these things, you can win with the search engines and with your readers at the same time. Isn’t that what everybody wants?
May 16th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
That’s EXACTLY what everybody wants.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Does it matter from an SEO perspective whether you build the landing page with a Wordpress Post or Page? I ask because I seem to have better luck ranking with posts than pages, but not sure why that should matter.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
The only difference David is that WordPress will usually pass more link weight to a post. Your post will end up on category, archive, and tag pages - each of those pages will link to the post. It will also start off being linked to from your home page, of course that will change when you create more posts.
WordPress pages don’t show up in any of those locations. However, if you passed the same amount of links to a page by editing other pages/posts and adding links, you would be able to achieve the same ranking with a page.
Many people also use ‘Recent Posts’ widgets in their sidebars, which pass a site-wide link to 10 or so recent posts. This would also increase the PR of those posts, which would make them rank better for a while.
I’ve had more than one occasion where people have asked me about a ranking they had and then lost - we discovered that it happened because the post dropped off the Recent Posts widget.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:41 am
Along this same thinking… I’m considering changing my home page from the default Wordpress setup to a specific page. This will allow me to set up categories in the main story and know they’re always going to be the first thing people find when they land on the page (ie. shortcuts, software, media, etc).
Is this a bad idea? I just think, some people may not find those pages that I think would have the broadest appeal. Sometimes my most recent posts aren’t the biggest attraction, so do they deserve top billing? Of course, I could do what you’ve done with “Best Articles…” Maybe I can make that the very top item on the side bar. Is that better?
May 16th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I love the excellent example of internal linking in the examples section - superb.
Have a good weekend Court.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
It has always been keywords that is important. They must be associate with URL, title and content, so that it can be related to.
May 16th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Court,
I was wondering about this exact thing the other day. I am thinking of running a PPC campaign on a couple of my blogs and was debating making a static “page” for them or using a post.
Thanks for the information about the link juice for the post, I hadn’t even thought of that!
May 16th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Well Court,
You must be a great teacher and I must be a good student, because finally I did not have to go back and make changes to my site after reading one of your posts, I got the whole checklist!!
Thanks!
Olga
May 17th, 2008 at 5:59 am
I have read quite a bit about landing pages being used with PPC but have not seen much about Organic landing pages. I guess it’s the new ‘landing page’.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Very useful. Thanks. And hope i can do what you wrote here.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Hello Court:
Where are the “H1″ tags? You used to have them at the top right in a faint color text and small size controlled by CSS. Did Google give you problems with that? Or some other reason no longer using them?
David Bean
May 18th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
No Google didn’t give me a problem with them. The problem is getting them to fit in with the new design. As you can see from what I have explained in this post, the H1 tag’s SEO benefit is quite secondary to some other factors.
May 17th, 2008 at 9:14 pm
A very good article that offers just what I have been looking for. Thanks for the tips..
May 18th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Landing pages are a great way to grab extra traffic. You can branch out and target any keywords. With a good keyword density, nicely put together landing page, and some keyword authority, you should see a decent benefit. Once you get the feel, you then should research targeted keywords. Be careful not to astray too far from your niche or you wont keep the visitors on your site. This hurts your CTR and bounce rate. Some of you might ask if you can have too many landing pages. It depends on if you worry about Google or not. The Google gods might not like a site that has 50 landing pages just to grab traffic from every keyword set possible. I would suggest around 10 would be the max. Track your pages for a few weeks. Delete the one bringing in the lowest amount of traffic. If you think you can fix it, edit the keywords, title, keyword density ect. Researching keywords will be the make or break of your landing pages (Unless you cant follow Courtney’s instructions above).
Anyone use Site Hoppin? Boy do I have a treat for you. I suggest you check out my Site Hoppin post if you want to get tons of beer credits easily.
Shudogg Dot Com - Make Money Online Blogging
May 18th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
[…] Courtney Tuttle - Introduction to Organic Landing Pages […]
May 18th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Court.
I am confused by your terminology. You call them “organic landing pages”, but I see them as articles, or posts. Why are these landing pages?
Surely you would not buy traffic and have visitors Land on those pages? So then in my prior understanding, these are not landing pages at all.
As I understand things, landing pages generally have a single purpose, and preferably a SINGLE outgoing link. Either take the desired action, or don’t. That’s it.
Thanks, love your site.
May 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
There are a lot of different types of landing pages. It sounds like you’re talking about squeeze landing pages.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Great tip… I need to myself have one, right now everythig is directed to the main page that doesn’t even have an H1 tag…
Ajith
May 19th, 2008 at 2:34 am
Feel free to slap me if I’m going to say sounds stupid, but wouldn’t this be good practice for any page you built?
I can see that sometimes you might need to build a page because it’s essential for the topic you’re writing about and has no real keyword value financially, but wouldn’t most of what you explained Court would make sense for all pages?
May 19th, 2008 at 4:11 am
Hello!
Nice site! I do have a comment on this post. I was wondering if you think that bloggers think TOO much about word placement on their posts. Meaning, do you think that if blog posters are passionate about what they are writing that people shouldn’t really think about exactly where to place words on a particular post?
On the other hand, those who post something, as you mentioned, shouldn’t spam their pages. It can be quite annoying when bloggers do that. It can actually turn a reader off…so, I agree what what you said about that.
I enjoyed reading your blog posts, and I’ll be returning to read more in the near future! Great job with the site!
- Venture Blogster
May 19th, 2008 at 8:32 am
I think that they don’t think enough about it. They either don’t think about it at all and lose the benefit, or they don’t think about it enough and it ends up looking very spammish. If they think about it enough, they will get the words there AND it will present well to a reader.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:44 am
Hey Court,
Not sure my earlier comment got through. I was asking if you thought the techniques you outlined for landing pages would be good practice for the majority of pages we create?
Surely it can never be a bad thing to attract traffic. Or did I misunderstand something?
Ray
May 19th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Hey court,
Are these techniques not suitable for any pages we build? Surely if they attract traffic, it would be sensible to use them all the time. Or am I missing something.
May 19th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
So I think the key is just grab the keywords that relate most closely to your site? & you mentioned after the landing site is set up properly, what we do next is to build links to increase the keyword authority of the page. Any further tips or resources on achieving that? Hopefully we’ll see it in the next post!
May 19th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Thats all very good the only thing I’d add is to make individual landing pages for your different buyer types and look for what your customers are having problems with in forums and other blogs.
May 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I really like how wordpress handles their permalinks. All I have to do is make sure that the keywords are in the title. Technorati tags are really good also
May 21st, 2008 at 10:54 am
Is there any value in using Squidoo as a landing page? You could conceivably create one for each keyword and they all will point to your main page, increasing the link authority, right? Is that too simple?
May 31st, 2008 at 8:52 pm
[…] Introduction to Organic Landing Pages at Court’s Internet Marketing School. […]
June 5th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
Like the detail of your proper linking structure and the ease in which you explain how to build an organic landing page.
October 23rd, 2008 at 6:04 am
Really very very interested Article. thank you very much
August 13th, 2009 at 10:21 am
first i would like to say thanks as i am very very new to seo and i heard lots of thing about the landing page (the picture is great
).
somewhere i read that landing page get you in trouble if you didn’t optimised it and provided keyword in bulk, you didn’t put light on this part… please elaborate on this..
September 27th, 2009 at 10:09 am
Geting traffic to your blog or website is the beauty of online biz.
To Make Money Or Sell Online All You Need Is Good Traffic.. 180 Thousand Traffic T Month Is Not That Too much…
with http://www.affiliatedecoder.blogspot.com you get the best result free reading good SEO articles from great writers. linking you to success is our atitude!
January 20th, 2010 at 6:46 am
oh! Yesterday I had written about HTML tags in my blog. It’s realy work I think. I mean to get traffic from Google/