Thursday, October 13, 2011

How Landing Pages relate to SEO Links


After building a website it is vital to the marketing that links be set up which connect the site to any electronically published articles and posts. Most people understand the importance of linking their site, but the key point to remember is that content written about in the online marketing must be directly linked to the corresponding page on the website. If you are targeting a keyword for a specific product that you are selling then you want to link the article to the page that displays the item in question. As the search engines look for direct connections and relevancy in the written materials that appear online and how those links relate to the website you do not want to set up the link to bring your site visitors to the home page if you are talking about a product that is featured on a product page. 

If you make the reader work to reach the pages that they want to see, you will lose them before they reach the page that highlights the product your keywords are written about. Using ease of navigation to bring a reader from the blog posting or online article to your site you can directly link a webpage to the subject matter of the article.

For example, today I was working on an article for an SEO client that had an enormous page address connecting the target link. It was filled with back slashes and .aspx?= coding directions that lead to a very specific page on a huge website. With a large inventory to cover, the article singled out one product from among hundreds of others; so the link from that article had to be directed to the exact item that I was writing for. Without the proper link for the target URL a reader would have to search the entire site for the product. Taking a great deal of time and effort that would most likely confuse and frustrate anyone that was interested in the product being promoted, the business would lose the customer and the article would lose credibility with search engines and the intended target audience.

Although linking the appropriate landing page with the corresponding keyword(s) sounds trivial the reality is that the search engines do recognize the relevant link which can increase the quality score of the site. Search engine optimization therefore must always have a purpose to it. With keywords carrying the weight of the marketing strategy, stressing the importance of linking articles and blogs to the exact page of the site (that is being referenced the search engines) will make the right connection and have a positive impact on the marketing efforts of the site.

Something else that I run across in my work which troubles me as an SEO professional is when a client changes their website and deletes their old links as they update the content on their site. This is frustrating because all the materials that have been previously published and linked to the missing pages have nowhere to go. In other words the links that have been established go nowhere and the articles that once had meaning to the Internet marketing strategy are lost. Although I agree that updating the site allows a fresh look at the pages by the search robots, I personally prefer to maintain each page's HTML address; so that all of the work that has been created for the optimization of the site remains intact and searchable from the links that are already established.
 
With landing pages that no longer exist the work of online marketing is stifled and the site which may be gaining ground in the search results will lose credibility. If you are going to update a page (and I do recommend doing that from time to time), please remember to keep the same page address names in the URL so that the search engines can maintain the previously connected links and support the ongoing work of optimization which after all is the goal of any online marketing media strategy.

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