Search Engine Optimization And Landing Pages

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Landing pages often annoy me. I am left wondering on the search engine optimization and page design strategies of these webmasters. And I am not alone on this. In fact it is strange how, in researching one topic, another loosely related article appears, almost to reinforce the original line of research.

I was originally researching Google’s new attack on poor performing advertisers by undertaking tests of their landing pages amongst other things. Poor performing ad units with slow, poorly designed or irrelevant landing pages will get be ranked lower. The effect will be to place them well down in publishers ad units. Pare of good search engine optimization is page design and part of page design is load speed.

DazzlinDonna from SEO Scoop wrote a rant on terrible landing pages and I agree with most of what she has to say, with one proviso, she didn’t go far enough. I agree that relevance is a major issue when it comes to landing pages, however load speed is also an issue. If I can go and pour a coffee and return to find the page still loading, forget it. I am out of here. What I cannot understand is that often these pages are for search engine optimization ‘experts’ – yes sure! Her opening paragraph says it all:

Let’s get one thing very, very clear. A good search ranking is wonderful … but for all that is sacred in the geekdom, please don’t ruin a perfectly good ranking with a terrible landing page!

Google’s take on the subject:

we would penalize the ranking of paid ads in several circumstances: few users were clicking on a particular ads, an ad’s landing page was not relevant, or if users don’t like an ad’s content.

Of course, that only affects the ad units ranking, not the sites ranking. They can still, through clever search engine optimization techniques, rank number one in the SERP’s. Landing pages are a window into the website itself. If your landing page sucks, then so does your website.