The landing page is the first web page a visitor sees after she clicks on an AdWords ad (the little text-only ads you see on the right hand side of a search results page). The web address for this page is sometimes called the “destination URL” or the “clickthrough URL”.

Since the idea of placing AdWords ads is to generate an action from the user, the landing page should help the user continue on the path to completing the action. She already has initiated the action by clicking on your ad. You don’t want to lose her after that - you want to “convert” her.

The best landing pages consider the users’ intent when they click on an ad. You should consider your keywords and ad’s text. Ask yourself, “What information does the user need next in order to (fill in this blank)?” The whole point is to give the user what she wants and don’t make her hunt around your website for it. The best thing would be for the user to land on a page that gives her the most useful and accurate information about what she’s just clicked on.

The landing page may or may not be the same as your homepage. There are a few different ways to think about this:

• If you’ve advertised about a specific product or service, the landing page should prominently feature that product or service. Maybe that product or service is the only one on the page. For example, if you’re a shoe store advertising yellow boots, take the user to the yellow boots page, not the homepage.
• If you’re have a special offer, your landing page should make the special offer very obvious. The special offer might be the only topic on that page.
• If your ad references a section of your business, such as “cat boarding” in a veterinary hospital, you would want the user to land on the cat boarding services page of your website (not the homepage).
• If your ad advertises your whole business, for example “cat boarding”, your landing page would probably be your home page.

Another reason to provide quality landing pages is that it could end up costing you less. According to Google:

“…advertisers who are not providing useful landing pages to our users will have lower Quality Scores that in turn result in higher minimum bid requirements for their keywords.”

Over the past year (2005-2006), Google has twice made changes to its algorithms for landing page quality in AdWords. Google has stated that these changes only negatively affected a small number of advertisers, so they probably would not affect your website. What’s useful to know here is that Google is looking at your website the same way a potential user would.

Real Examples

I googled “acupuncture for headaches”. Here are the Google search results:

Search for “acupuncture for headaches” on Google

Here’s what happened when I clicked each of the four Sponsored Search links on the right side of the screen:

Acupuncture New Jersey took me to this clinic’s homepage. I had to click three times to get to an Adobe Acrobat (“PDF”) file with case studies about the use of acupuncture for headaches.
San Francisco Acupuncture took me to the homepage for the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. I clicked twice to see a list of conditions they treat, but there was no specific information about headaches (The word “San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA” at the bottom of the ad indicates that this is a local AdWords result, which is useful, because I’m near San Francisco).
Acupressure for Headache is an affiliate marketing website.
Acupuncture for Headaches is an online medical insurance broker.

If you were an SF Bay Area acupuncturist specializing in headaches and used local AdWords search, you’d be one of two advertisers for this keyword, and you could do a much better job with your landing page just by reading this article.

Landing Page Content

Figuring out and answering the questions your visitors will have is the key to an effective landing page which results in conversions.

Taking the above example, what I would want to know if I were to land on an Acupuncture clinic page:

• Is the acupuncturist licensed or accredited? Is this the industry standard?
• Is the acupuncturist experienced? How many years has he been practicing? Did he go to a good school?
• Does he specialize in particular conditions?
• How long does treatment last? How will I know that this treatment is going to be effective?
• Can I use my medical insurance?
• I want to feel comfortable about the acupuncturist, the facility and the acupuncture process.
• Does he have referrals from Western doctors or other clients?
• Does he give well-thought out and useful information on his website?
• Does he know a little about a lot of alternative therapies or a lot about acupuncture?
• Can I get sense of what sort of person the acupuncturist is? Are there photos?
• How do I make an appointment or ask questions?
• If I had a specific condition that I had typed into Google, I would want to know if he treated it and about his experience and knowledge of treatment of that condition. References

  Wikipedia entry on landing pages
  Seth Godin on Landing Pages
  Google AdWords Landing Page & Site Quality Guidelines
  Inside AdWords, the Google AdWords blog
  Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing for Dummies, Peter Kent, 2006.

  [Thank you to Tracy Rabold for this article - Ed.]

Some logos from thelogocompany.net: creative and cheap

There are many affordable ways to get a corporate identity. Wired Magazine recently conducted a test of some cheap logo providers. They invented a company and asked online shops to create a logo for them. Unfortunately the online version of the article Grading the logo shops does not show the logos they came up with.

The top 3 were these (all comments are from Wired):

- The Logo Company
Service: Three business days; $75. Fast and easy. Ordering was a breeze, and they gave us four decent, relevant designs.
[You can see examples of their work here on the left.]
Grade: B+

- The Logo Loft
Service: Four business days and four options; $99. Sue, the customer service rep, called - called! - to clarify our order.
Grade: B
UPDATE 4/07: A client has had a negative experience with this company recently

- Logo Design Creation
Service: Overnight; $69. Placed the order at the end of one day and got three logos to choose from the next morning. Hey, we are living in the future!
Grade: B-

Gotlogos which I mentioned in the post Making small business look big, cheaply, only got a C+ because

Can't call customer service. Charged an extra $50 for a hi-res digital file of our logo.

A few months ago I posted on the 3 fundamental skills of web writing. I re-read that post and realized it needed a real life example to truly be useful. So let's recap.

Writing for the web is different because people read differently on the web. In fact, they don't read but they scan, so everything you write needs to be scannable. These are the web writing guidelines:

- bolded, italicized and hyperlinked keywords
- lots of lists
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- short paragraphs with one idea
- always start with the conclusion, giving readers what they are seeking upfront
- use lots of captioned photos, diagrams and graphics to illustrate your points
- make it less formal and more personalized

The following is a paragraph that appears on one of my clients' homepage:

At the Mind Wave Institute we use a unique and effective combination of Medical Hypnotherapy, Guided Imagery, Mindfulness Meditation and Life Style Coaching, to help you achieve optimal health and vitality using the natural healing power of your mind. Your mind has a powerful healing influence on your body, however most of us are not trained to access it. The mind body techniques taught at Mind Wave Institute allow you to access the full potential of your mind. Giving you the tools you need to create a life you love, free of pain and anxiety. Specialties include weight loss, pain management, anxieties, phobias, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, stress related medical issues and hypnosis for childbirth preparation - HypnoBirthing.

And here is (almost) the same content, but modified according to the web writing guidelines:

Are you suffering from:

• Being Overweight
• Smoking
• Teeth Grinding (Bruxism)
• Stress
• Anxieties and Phobias
• Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

At the Mind Wave Institute we use the proven techniques of Medical Hypnotherapy, Self Hypnosis Training, Guided Imagery, Mindfulness and Guided Meditation and Life Style Coaching to help you achieve optimal health and vitality.

These techniques tap into the usually unaccessible subconscious and allow you to use the natural healing power of your mind to its fullest potential.

Which one would you rather read?

Millions of people use Internet photo-sharing services such as Kodakeasysharegallery (formerly ofoto.com - what were they thinking with that new name?) and Snapfish to share their photos with friends and families.

I have used Ofoto for some years and found that there are many disadvantages:

- the thumbnails and full-size photos are too small

- you can't see which are the most popular photos

- you can't have multiple albums from different people for one event

- you can't subscribe to updates so that you are alerted when new photos are published

- the whole purpose of these sites is to sell you prints, so there is a lot of annoying “calls-to-action” and advertising

Thankfully there is an Open Source (freely available) solution to sharing photos on the Internet, and it's called Gallery. I recently set up it up for a wedding, and the experiment was surprisingly successful. Within the first few weeks of the Gallery going live, friends who attended the wedding in Antigua had uploaded more than 800 gorgeous photos (see the sample below). Most of these were uploaded in their original full size format (files from 2 to 7 MB) and so can be printed from any color printer.

The happy couple

A beach in Antigua (photo courtesy of Dino)

Even though Gallery is a wonderful piece of software, it still has a few drawbacks:

- installation can be tricky if it's your first time

- easy to use is not exactly the best way to describe it

- the look is not easily customizable

Gallery 2.0 is allegedly coming soon so these issues maybe resolved with that release. I'll keep you updated.

I already talked about how you can keep track of blog updates by using bloglines.com in a previous post, How to read blogs. Apart from reading blogs, there is another powerful way to keep track of news on a topic which is often faster.

This is done through search feeds and news alerts. I first discovered search feeds through eBay. Imagine you are looking for something specific which is not currently listed on the site. I really enjoy typing on ergonomic keyboards, and went through a period where I would regularly spill some green tea on my keyboard, rendering it useless (I really like green tea too). So I resorted to eBay for finding a replacement, and started using what they call favorite searches, which sent me an email every time someone posted an ergonomic keyboard for sale. I went through 4 or 5 keyboards during my spillage period, and this feature saved me from having to go to the eBay site to check if anything new had come up. Happily the epidemic has abated.

Here's my favorite keyboard! About $12 if you're lucky on eBay.

Other sites have similar services. Bloglines (they call it a search feed) and Technorati (keyword watchlist) allows you subscribe to searches for words which appear on new entries on blogs. Google News calls it news alert and sends you an email as it happens, and Yahoo News allows you to create your own RSS feed with your keywords of choice. With PubSub, you have a subscription stack, and you can download their toolbar to be alerted straight away in your browser of a match to your search keywords.

Services such as PubSub's are called persistent-search; they like to describe themselves as prospective, or geared to the future, rather than retrospective which is how search services such as Google are described. And they can make their users money. Here's a Wall Street Journal article with an example of an investor acting on persistent search tip.

If you are working to be the recognized expert in your field, this way of tracking news allows you to always know what is going on.

Here’s one “old” way to read blogs:

1. Find a blog you like
2. Bookmark the page
3. Frequently remember to check that bookmark to read the new entries

If the blog which interests you has an email subscription box (see top right for this blog right here), you may be able to enter your email. In which case, every time there is a new post, an email will be sent to you which you will ignore because you are already getting too much email.

When you start to track dozens of blogs, neither way works well.

Here’s the “new” way to read blogs:

1. Go to bloglines.com
2. Create an account (believe you me, it’ll be one of the most useful websites you’ll ever find)
3. “Subscribe” to the blog(s) which you want to keep up with. You can create folders to categorize them.

Advantages:

1. No more email inbox clutter
2. It becomes much easier to track many blogs, as next to each of the blogs there is a number which lets you know how many new entries there have been since your last visit.
3. Very efficient: by scanning the summary of the listed blog entries, you only need to go to the actual blog page if you want to read the full entry.