RSS FeedsWriting content for the perfect landing page
Jul 19, 2007 7 Comments »
Your landing page is one of the most important pages of your website. Don’t let the laws of generalities and guesswork govern it. Pay close attention to what you write and present on your landing page and you’ll see a big change — for the better — in your conversion rate.
A landing page is a web page where your visitor arrives for the first time — from where he or she enters your website. Many think that your index page, or your home page is always the landing page, or should always be the landing page, but it’s not like that. As you grow your content, as you grow your number of pages, different people link to different pages from your website, and the search engines too rank your pages differently. For instance on Google, your index page may appear on the fifth page of the search result pages but one of your subject-specific pages may appear on the first page, or may be at the top. So for that subject, the subject-specific page becomes your landing page and hence, becomes your most crucial page if you want to earn some business off the traffic from Google. But then, if you consider the incoming links from the search engines, you cannot, and I think you should not, consider every page as the landing page. So there are two most important landing pages on your website:
- The page from where your visitors buy your product, or decide to pay for your service
- The page where your visitors arrive when they click on your advertisement appearing on another website (or your own website or blog), for instance, the Google Adwords.
The second kind of landing page too can be a “buy” or “pay” page, but sometimes you just want to provide information on that page. The main point is, a landing page should do precisely what it is supposed to do and it should do it optimally, without any distractions.
There are many things — images, text, layout, videos — that make a great landing page, but since I’m a copywriter I’ll focus on how to write content for a landing page. Here are a few points:
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Been busy, changing hosts
Jul 17, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been having severe problems with my previous hosts (I won’t mention their name; they are good guys otherwise) and if you visited this blog in the past few days you must have encountered repetitive problems. Small outages and email-related problems had been a norm, and recently they literally accused me of sending spam mails when it was some problem with their own email server. I have no reason to send spam and in fact spam will harm my business — 100% of the time my clients approach me through my content writing website, through this blog, or through referrers (most of my clients recommend my services).
Anyway, I’ve changed to Dreamhost (the link contains my referral code) and so far I love their interface. I had many websites and blogs hosted on the previous host (still have some) and I’ve been gradually transferring them to the new server — a time consuming and a treacherous task. The day before yesterday when I shifted amrithallan.com I forgot to create my official email address that I use to interact with my clients. As a result a few new clients who tried to contact me through my contact form couldn’t do so. Fortunately some of them noticed the Skype button on my website and contacted me.
I hope to resume normal blogging from tomorrow onwards. Thanks for visiting.
Technorati Tags: hosting
How To Optimize Your Blog For Both Readers And Search Engines
Jul 12, 2007 8 Comments »
Both readers and search engines are important for your blog (although personally I feel readers are more important). While optimizing your blog you should keep in mind that your blog doesn’t lose one to gain the other. Readers are significant, but a big chunk of them are sent by the search engines. Search engines are crucial, but your readers can help you rank better by linking to you. Optimize your blog for both of them.
To run a successful blog you have to optimize it both for your readers and the search engines. You understandably write great content that your readers love but you need search engines — unless you are a celebrity being hounded by your psychopathic fans — to get those readers to your blog. With millions of web pages and blog posts competing to be found as early as possible on the search engine result pages, it’s very crucial that your post appears on the first page, or at least on the second page of the search engine results, for the keywords and expressions of your choice.
Your readers are your main strength. No matter how much traffic you are able to derive from the search engines, people will leave your blog within the first few seconds if they don’t find something valuable on your blog. If they like your content, they will not only read it, they will also recommend it and endorse it by linking to it, or mailing it to others. The more they come and the more they link, the better your blog performs at the search engines, and vice-versa. Consequently, your blog should be both reader-friendly and search-engine-friendly. Here are a few things you can do to achieve both:
Read the rest of this entry »All these Social Networking Websites
Jul 07, 2007 3 Comments »
Why are there all of a sudden so many social networking websites popping up like the rain drops in a rainy season. According to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey more than half (55%) of all online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites.
Within a search of two minutes I found the following websites:
This WikiPedia link has a massive list of social networking websites.
All these websites provide business and social networking and interaction tools. And if you believe the trend, many of these websites are great hits among the young as well as the professionals. Amazingly, some of them are outright silly. Take for instance Twitter. It beats logic why people would even visit the website, leave alone use it for leaving ultra-boring messages. An average MySpace page is so gross to look at.
Some SEO experts are already suggesting you to invest your time on these websites to generate quality traffic to your websites and blogs? But is it really worth it? Depends on what sort of traffic you want and how much spare time you have got. If you are a big company or a rich entrepreneur, sure you can hire someone to interact on these websites on your behalf because extra traffic doesn’t harm (if you can bear the bandwidth cost). But if are a one-man-woman team then every minute you spend promoting your service is precious. Maintaining social networking website can easily turn out to be a time consuming affair.
But Social Networking Websites are not useless
Social networking websites, if used correctly, can definitely help you build brand awareness and create the right buzz for your service or product, especially for services and products that would appeal to the frequenters of these websites. The power of social media websites lies in the massive amount of traffic they generate. Currently numerous films and other entertainment programs are being promoted through various social media websites.
Technorati Tags: social media websites, face book, twitter, ryze, orkut, pownce, jaiku
Posted by Amrit | Tags: Social Media, Search Engine Marketing, General
Google defines Net Neutrality
Jun 20, 2007 3 Comments »
Network neutrality — the concept that the Internet should remain free and open to all comers — has been a major public policy priority for Google over the last two years. But anyone who has followed the debate closely knows that one of the challenges raised by our opponents has been defining what exactly the term means. The fact is, net neutrality can mean different things to different people.
Last year Google and other members of the Open Internet Coalition played a big part in the congressional debate over net neutrality. Earlier this year, the FCC agreed to take a fresh look at the issue and seek public comments. We figured this would be a good opportunity to help clarify what we mean when we talk about net neutrality, so yesterday we filed these comments with the FCC. A few key points: [ What Do We Mean By “Net Neutrality”? ]
A good explanation.
Technorati Tags: net neutrality
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