Focus is Key for Landing Pages - Capture Their Attention

A landing page is actually a “second impression.” The first impression is the ad through which the visitor clicked to arrive at the landing page. Since they left one page to go to another, it behooves you to make sure they know they arrived at the right place. Tell your visitors that the landing page is relevant to what they clicked through. Use the same colors and logos if you can. Use the same title as you used for the original ad. If you made a particular offer in the ad, it should be clearly visible on your page. Some landing pages that visitors arrive at through sponsored links on search engines even include search text: “You searched for Gibson guitar,” for example.

Once your visitors know they’re in the right place, it’s your job to keep them focused. Most people have a shorter attention span for online activities than they do for offline things. That’s even true for something as simple as reading. No matter how good your monitor is, it’s still much more restful to read a book or magazine offline than it is to read online (especially when many of us already stare at a computer screen all day at our jobs). This makes users restless; they’ll fidget, and fidgeting can mean they click away from your site if they’re bored.

Format your page for the shorter attention span and you’ll calm the fidgets. Think short paragraphs, bullet points, and highly relevant content. Consider your target audience carefully, starting with the search they did. Are they looking for information about a type of product, the features for a specific product, or what?

For example, in Roche’s blog entry, he compared landing pages from several different companies for a “chiminea” – a type of outdoor fireplace. He gave good marks to the second landing page he checked because it gave him definitions for several related products, as well as buying tips. He discovered that what he really wanted wasn’t a chiminea, but a fire pit. Normally, you’ll want to keep the copy on your landing page relatively short, as I emphasize above, but if you’re selling a product or service that requires some explanation, you may need to go into some detail to avoid confusion. To that end, you’ll want to test different landing pages, and different aspects of your landing pages, to compare how well they convert.

Focus is Key for Landing Pages

If you set yourself up properly, when users click through an ad for your product or company on another site, they end up on a landing page. This is your sales pitch to convince them to convert. You’ll find plenty of tips for building, testing, and improving your landing pages, but it all boils down to one word: focus.

Time and again I encountered this point in my research. Lisa Barone made the point in a blog for Bruce Clay. She was covering a MarketingSherpa seminar about its updated book on landing pages. The sentence that leaped out at me was “What makes a landing page effective is its focus around a single topic.” She wrote that in the context of fine-tuning the eye flow for a landing page, but it’s really what brings a landing page together: everything on the page focuses on one topic, with one goal: convincing your visitors to convert.

Hard selling belongs on your landing page, but it’s a special kind of hard sell. You must take your visitors by the hand and guide them to what you want them to do. Matthew Roche shared some insight as to the necessity for this in a February 2007 post in his blog. In the days before the web, consumers simply read and/or watched ads, which marketers could at least imagine led smoothly and directly to a sale. But it’s quite rare for a person to “go online, type a URL into a browser, visit that single site, accomplish a task, and leave the web completely,” Roche notes. “More often, we search, we dither, we explore, we lose track, we gain focus, we complete an action, we get bored, we get called for dinner, we log off.”

This is what you’re up against when you create your landing page. Your landing page needs to grab your visitors’ attention, hold onto that attention while giving them what they want and expect, and persuade them to do what you want them to do: buy the product, sign up for the newsletter, what have you. In marketing, this is sometimes referred to as the three Cs: capture their attention, communicate the value of your offering, and close the deal. In this article I’ll go over each of these points and what you can do to make sure your landing pages successfully carry them through.

How To Use HTML Meta Tags

Meta Tag Overview
What are meta tags? They are information inserted into the "head" area of your web pages. Other than the title tag (explained below), information in the head area of your web pages is not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers. Instead, meta information in this area is used to communicate information that a human visitor may not be concerned with. Meta tags, for example, can tell a browser what "character set" to use or whether a web page has self-rated itself in terms of adult content.
Let's see two common types of meta tags, then we'll discuss exactly how they are used in more depth:

In the example above, you can see the beginning of the page's "head" area as noted by the HEAD tag -- it ends at the portion shown as /HEAD.
Meta tags go in between the "opening" and "closing" HEAD tags. Shown in the example is a TITLE tag, then a META DESCRIPTION tag, then a META KEYWORDS tag. Let's talk about what these do.