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The Big 3 Major Search Engines Google, Yahoo & Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have all agreed to Follow “Canonical Tag” in an attempt to reduce duplicate content across the web.

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If you run Online Marketing campaigns such as PPC, SEO, Affiliate or Email, landing pages are critical to their success. It is equally important to spend as much time developing your Landing Pages as it is developing the campaigns themselves.

Why put all that time, effort & money into sending traffic to your website if you aren’t making sure the page your visitor hits is optimised and shows them exactly what they are looking for!

As eBusiness consultants , we have seen what works and what doesn’t.

Here are our Top 5 Tips for creating successful landing pages that will ensure your Online Marketing gets you the best ROI.

1. Keep It Simple.

Todays on-line marketplace is fast paced and visitor attention spans are at their lowest. Visitors will spend very little time searching a page to see if you have what they are looking for. Your Landing Pages need to be very focused and simple.

Round Up

* Use short paragraphs
* Bullet points
* Use value propositions

2. Obvious Navigation

When a visitor has arrived at your Landing Page, they will probably have been directed from one of your PPC, SEO, Affiliates or Emails campaigns. It is essential they know where they are and how to navigate out.
Write at the top of the landing page exactly where they’ve landed so the visitor knows they are in the right place.

3. Don’t Over Complicate the Page

You don’t need to try to wow your visitors with lots of flashy videos or Flash animation. This will frustrate your visitors because all they want is the key information they were searching for, not how clever your web team are!

Again, keep it simple!

4. Spread your Calls to Action

Different visitors behave differently; some act quickly, meaning you want your call to action at the top of the page, whilst others want to take everything in and will scroll down the whole page and then take action. Therefore your main calls to action must have links at the top, bottom and in between. Make it easy for visitors to take action whenever they’re ready.

5. Try It, Measure It, Change It

Your Landing Page will not be perfect 1st time round. Ensure you have tracking installed like Google Analytics (free) and use additional tools like Google Web Optimiser (free). Track what your visitors do when they get on your site, where they click, when they exit, and which calls to action are the most effective.

Based on this information, make changes to your Landing Page to reduce exits, dead links, and improve click through and conversions rates.

Overview

You will never know exactly what is going to work best with regards to Internet marketing and specifically landing pages; trends are always changing. Your visitors are always different and their level of sophistication is growing rapidly. The technology is changing quickly and how we use online and landing pages is a work in progress.

One major trend is that offers to visitors are becoming more and more specific because the more specific the offer, the higher the conversions rate and the more qualified the lead.

It is better to have more specifically targeted landing pages ,than fewer general landing pages. So put the time into being specific and getting high quality leads rather than being lazy with your marketing chasing loads of low quality leads!

Adobe Systems are teaming up with Google & Yahoo to make content that is mixed with Flash easier for search engines to index. This should have a big impact on how Flash pages/content is sorted & ranked buy those search engines. The great news for sites with existing Flash .SWF files is they won’t need to make any changes to the pages or code, all the work will be done by the spider programmes from Google & Yahoo!

Great! But what does it all mean?

For the end users, it means more relevant search results, according to Justin Everett-Church, senior product manager for Flash at Adobe. “The perfect page for you may have been out there, but it was all Flash content, so it had low search ranking. This will mean it will have a high ranking.”

The problem for search engines finding Flash-based pages is due to the dynamic nature of Flash, and pretty much any Web runtime, said Everett-Church. A HTML file is a flat file with links, while a Flash .SWF file has various states. Based on user interaction, you could go to different parts of the Flash file. When a search spider reaches a HTML page, it goes through the tags but discards SWF file references. With this new indexing method, when it finds an SWF file, it passes the job off to an optimised search program to examine the SWF file’s contents.

“Google has been working hard to improve how we can read and discover SWF files,” said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google, in a statement. “Through our recent collaboration with Adobe, we now help website owners that choose to design sites with Adobe Flash software by indexing this content better. Improving how we crawl dynamic content will ultimately enhance the search experience for our users.”

Google will be going live with the new SWF indexing technology this week, while Yahoo plans to release it at an undetermined point in the future, according to Everett-Church. He expects this change will have a big effect on search results. “There is so much content out there that has been indexed but not to the thoroughness that was possible,” he told InternetNews.com. “It will take a while for Google to spider all the SWFs out there, but as it goes you are going to see a big effect. One is that there will be more search results, and the ones higher up will be the ones with the great experience you’d expect with a Flash app.”