Inspired by Jonathan Mendez's post the 7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization I wrote a long post on The Seven+ Secrets of Super Landing Page Optimization for my friends over at Green Media - who really practice this stuff. Just look at Green Media's website and blog and you'll see what I mean.
One thing I think is useful and effective in landing page optimization - one of the "secrets" I'll now impart - is the power of synchronicity. With Green Media's site and blog - the color Green is prominent - and it's part of their name - it's part of their branding too.
Now, consider the website Coolhouseplans.com - if you go to their site now (and they have been the #1 ranking website for house plans, home plans and floor plans for quite some time) you'll notice the colors are light blues and greens with "snow" in the background. No mistake about that - the name and the imagery go hand and hand and make the landing page, in this case, their home page, more effective.
Point being - if your going to spend a lot of money on Paid Advertising - you better have your landing pages working at this level or you might be spending alot of money to get ....well, not much bang for the buck.
I know this is the case for several of my architectual clients who do Paid Advertising (well, they're my former clients now....let's leave it at that). The Paid results for many architectual house plans sites are worse than awful - they're horrible - and personally, if I were them - I'd not do PPC given the results they get - and I bet the majority of sites that do paid advertising have horrible results as well - but don't be one of them.
Another secret is the power of rhythm - and i know this because it's part of Art; think about the Golden Mean. Recently, it came to light that Google, in the design of it's search results pages, uses the Golden Mean in it's design and that's one of the reasons people instinctively want to do their searches on Google (and Google also is FASTER and more focused on what it does well than it's competitors). According to Threadwatch.org:
"..What is the Golden Ratio?
The golden ratio, or golden section is a number that crops up in nature, and particular beauty and perfection an astonishing number of times. A few facts to give you an idea of what we're talking about here:
- Phi is the only number who's square can be produced by simply adding 1
- and who's reciprocal by subtracting 1
- It's found in music, art, nature and science
- It's digits have been calculated to 10 million, and they never repeat.
- It's rumoured that Da Vinci's mona lisa was created using the golden triangle
Most of those fact were lifted from The Golden Rule
Enough with History, what does it mean to Google and Search Marketers?
We don't know exactly but, with the evident inclusion of LSI/A in the recent Google algorithm shift, many are beginning, as a result of DG's post to suspect that 1.618 may feature strongly in one or many factors of the algo - and as DG pointed out: It's just geeky enough to be true.
Things to play with...
What may be worth experimenting with would for me, include the following, based largely on what better seo minds tell me :)
- Incoming Link Text
Hard to do of course but say you're target word be "tractor", using the ~operator to find semantically relevant terms and aiming for the 1.618 ratio would seem reasonable- Outgoing Link Text
Much the same as above, 10 instances of tractor and 6 instances of "farm machinery" and other such terms- Keyword Density
You're gettin the picture now right?- Overall Theme
Possibly a bit out there, this one, but worth thinking about - particularly in terms of titles. "
In fact, in a recent interview Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience
"...
That brings up something else that was really interesting. If we separate the top sponsored from the right rail, the majority of the interaction happens on the page in that upper left real estate. One thing that became very apparent was that Google seemed to be the most aware of relevancy at that top of page, that Golden Triangle real estate. In all our scenarios, you showed top sponsored the least number of times and generally you showed fewer top sponsored results. We saw a natural tendency to break off the top 3 or 4 listings on a page and scan them as a set and then make your choice from those top 3 or 4. In Google, those top 3 or 4 almost always include 1 or 2 organic results, sometimes all organic results.
That's absolutely the case. Yes, we're always looking at how can we do better targeting with ads. But we believe part of the targeting for those ads is "how well do those ads match your query?" And then the other part is how well does this format and that prominence convey to you how relevant it is. That's baked into the relevance.
Our ad team has worked very very hard. One of the most celebrated teams at Google is our Smart Ads team. In fact, you may have heard of the Google Founder's Awards, where small teams of people get grants of stock of up to $10,000,000 in worth, split across a small number of individuals. One of the very first teams at Google to receive that award was the Smart Ads team. And they were looking, interestingly enough, at how you target things. But they were also looking at what's the probability that someone will click on a result. And shouldn't that probability impact our idea of relevance, and also the way we choose to display it. "
Well, that's probably enough for one post. My friends at Green Media have the whole thing worked out so they can get pretty good results on a consistent basis - but I'd say there's definitely some "secrets" to effective Landing Pages - and I hope I've discussed some of them here.
In fact, if you go to Green Media for Landing Page Optimization, and tell them I sent you - they may give you a special deal - just email them at greenmediainc@greenmediainc.com or call them at 212-947-6761.
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