A landing page is a web page that acts as an entry point of a particular section of your website. It sends a signal to the search engine about the contents of your website. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc. don’t actually rank websites in their search result; they actually rank the most relevant and most popular landing pages within websites in their search results. They search through the entire website and find the specific page that is most relevant and popular.
Hence when one talks about getting a better rank for their website, they actually target different landing pages on their site to rank higher. So it is very important to understand in depth, the various ways used for landing page optimization. In this article, we will be discussing SEO for the landing page, in detail.
Landing Page SEO Best Practices:
1. Include keywords on your title tag:
First decide the appropriate keyword to use, then introduce them very strategically on your landing page content. Put your keywords in the strategic places if you want to get a higher rank on SERPs.
The search engine is capable enough to interpret the topic of your page without any precise keywords in the HTML title tag. Using precise keywords are very important for the reason that they are seen at places of high visibility like search engine research pages (SERPs), tabs for web browser and social networks pages.
Different ways of using a keyword for SEO:
- Keep the length of the title under 60 characters. Though you can use special characters like “/“a nd “&” but avoid using capital letters.
- While placing the text, use the keywords in the first part of the title.
- Don’t use duplicate titles, as it may indicate that you are using duplicate content.
- Make a habit of using keywords appropriately and smartly.
- The title can have a brand name.
2. Content:
It is to be understood that keywords are the cues for the search engines, which can be incorporated in the pages. So, it becomes important to identify as to where to incorporate the keyword in your landing pages. You can follow the below mentioned steps to prepare your content properly.
- Include the keywords within the first 100-150 words of the content. This will help the user and the search engines to find your content very easily.
- Search engines nowadays use semantic search. They don’t need exact keywords to produce results of a query. The point that matters is the meaning of the words. Search engines like Google are very good at understanding the synonyms. So, usually, it is not necessary to use extra keywords. Related words will also serve the purpose.
- Create a content of considerate length which contains all relevant information about the topic. Usually content with more text have chances to rank higher.
3. Header optimization:
Header tags should be used to give a proper structure to the content. This enables the user to understand the key facts in very little time and most importantly it makes the content more understandable for search engines.
Action to be taken:
- Locate headings in a structural order. The main heading should be mentioned as <H1> in the code. Then go to the subheadings. The main heading must contain the targeted keywords.
- Create an outstanding and eye-catching heading, with the help of using various font sizes, formats, and styles.
4. Meta description SEO:
A Meta description is the text display on the SERP. It consists of URL, page title and description of your text, which helps the visitor to determine whether your page is about what they were searching for. It highly impacts on click-through rate. You must keep a few things on your mind while optimizing SEO metadata:
- Try to describe more with fewer words. The key points of your page should be well explained.
- Describe in such a way that it serves the purpose of the advertisement of your page. Also, optimize your metadata for keywords, so that the SERP highlights the keywords searched for, in user queries.
- Your description should not be similar to some existing page’s description otherwise SERP will consider it as a duplicate content.
5. Do interlinking:
Many pages on the same topic degrade the value of internal links. In this particular situation, it becomes very difficult for a search engine to find out the utmost relevant page for any particular topic. That’s why sometimes the wrong and irrelevant pages rank higher on the search results. Following steps can be followed in this case:
- Try out 301 redirects, an HTTP status code, to redirect the users from the irrelevant page to the most prominent page that should be ranked higher for that specific keyword or topic.
- For a specific topic, you can interlink your post. You may form a cluster of expertise on a particular subject. The ranking of the most relevant page could be improved by linking them back to the less prominent page.
6. Include search box in your Website home page:
It is always good to have a search box on your website/webpage, especially when you have multiple pages on your website. When you integrate your search box with Google analytics, you can easily know the keywords or queries searched by the visitor on your site. There will be following benefits of having a search box on your website:
- Bounce rate will be significantly reduced because with the help of Google analytics data you can easily get to know what users are searching and you can optimize things accordingly.
- On the basis of the queries asked by the users, the idea for new keywords will come.
7. Create backlinks:
You might have noticed sometimes that instead of the relevant page, irrelevant landing page rank higher, it happens because it has strong social media backlinks. You should also use the power of social media backlinks in the following ways:
- Use social media backlink for the pages you want to rank high.
- Ask the external sites to link your relevant pages.
- Check whether the irrelevant or wrong page has high authority backlinks.
8. Outbound link SEO optimization:
An outbound link that is used to direct the user to related external pages, gives more strength to the relevancy of your page. This way search engines easily understand the topic of your page.
- If a wrong page ranks high it means it has a number of high authority outbound links. Hence, the search engine feels it as a source of relevant and quality info and shows it on the top of the search list. Few things you should do to avoid such situation and get more benefits of theft bound link
- A page that is actually a hub of relevant and quality info needs to be strengthened with the use of the outbound links to authority sites in a similar niche.
- Remove the links to authority sites from the wrong pages.
9. Make it user-friendly for mobile users:
People always keep their smartphones along with them. People do use their smartphone very frequently for all queries.
Even Google has preferred mobile-first indexing. This means Google operates the mobile version of the webpage for crawling, indexing, and ranking. So make sure you consider the mobile-friendliness factor for good optimization.
- Ensure responsiveness for various versions of smartphones and tablets.
- Understand and follow the best methods for mobile-indexing.
- Make the navigation easier for the user, content must be clearly readable and should have better-loading speed.
10. Using Schema Markup:
Factors like vocabulary, images, etc are also useful in making your page more visible to the users. This type of optimization is called Schema markup. The use of this tool will make your page fitter for a particular query in search engine results.
You can try schema markup to your pages with some tools for search engines; for example, Google offers tools like Markup helper to implement a markup on a website and testing tool for previewing your extract or snippet. You may have some additional options like images, star rating, and reviews in your snippet.
Schema markup is a useful option to mark your webpages and you should try it out to stand out your page on search engines. Testing tool and Markup Helper are the tools for implementing and previewing snippets on the website.
11. Using Multimedia:
Using diagrams, images and multimedia on a webpage make it more interactive and engaging than just plain text. It may also increase the time spent by the user on the website. Not just an improvement in user experience, the use of multimedia can also be used to optimize for target keywords. The method is described below:
- Select the relevant images and add appropriate descriptions to them. The descriptions shall explain the context for the images and relevance to the topic by adding keywords. By adding these keywords to images, you can achieve better visibility for your images to both search engines and users.
- Adding a video transcript will make it an additional content on your page. The transcript is very useful for the users who cannot access the video
12. Improve Landing page loading speed:
Page loading speed highly impacts the ranking of the website. Slow speed makes the user switch the page. Google algorithm introduced several breakthrough technologies to make a decision to focus on speed. Few things you should avoid to improve the loading speed of your page
- Weak coding practices.
- Less optimized pictures.
- Undesirable redirects.
Use tools like Page speed insight and Webpage Test, to check the loading speed.
13. Place the social share button wisely:
- Place the social share button on the prominent space of your page so that your visitor can easily share your page’s content.
- Beware while placing the social share button because it may slow down the page loading time, so use it strategically to bring a big amount of referral traffic.
14. Avoid excessive ads:
Google penalizes sites which have a lot of ads above the imaginary fold. Factually, you can generate handsome revenue from displaying advertisements on your website. But the unnecessary and excessive ads badly affect your SEO ranking.
15. Open Graph optimization:
Open graph optimization is essential to attract conversion and clicks. You can decide how your content should be shown after sharing in social networking sites. OG tags allow snippets out of the link whenever it will get shared by you on social media.
- Insert an open Graph at the HTML tags.
- Insert in the header tags and Meta tags.
- OG does not directly impact on SEO. It is just useful for social link optimization. So it is not necessary to optimize it from the keywords point of view.
16. Keep the subscription process simple to convert:
Keep fewer field to fill, it will help to higher the conversion. Don’t make it too complicated or too long, otherwise, you may lose your potential subscriber.
17. Some other tips:
- a) Keep distractive links away from your page.
- b) The headline should be simple, clear, relevant and informative.
- c) Have neat, clean eye-catching and soothing website design.
- d) Do some creativity for a call to action.
Conclusion:
To maintain the traffic on your page for a long time, you consistently need to update yourself with new landing page optimizations techniques.
Landing pages with the best SEO will surely bring huge traffic to your page, resulting in higher conversions. It enhances the possibility that whenever someone needs to search something related to the same what you are offering; your services and offers would be on the higher rank. So, try to invest the time to understand the depth of SEO and make good use of it.