We add new pages to our website hoping to rank them well for the top keywords. However, good search engine ranking alone is not going to help us achieve our business goals. There is more to it, what is more important is to accomplish the desired results after the visitor arrives at our website.
All the websites in general can be categorized in to the following groups in terms of what they would want their visitors to do after they arrive at the website:
- Signup for an account
- Purchase a product or hire a service using the online shopping cart
- Visit another page or section of your website
- Subscribe to the newsletter
- Share the page with their friends
- View or click on the advertisements displayed
Unless and until your landing page accomplishes any of the desired tasks above, there is no use getting visitors to your site or in getting top rankings. Therefore, the webmaster’s concentration should be on optimizing the landing page.
While building your website, you must have a specific goal for each page and the entire website should be built with that goal in mind. The goal of individual pages cannot go against the overall goal of the entire website. One of the rule of thumb that you should remember while optimizing your website is that the entire optimization efforts should be geared towards meeting the needs of the human visitors and just not pleasing the search engines. Moreover, getting visitors for visitors sake is not going to be helpful for your website as it will be waste of money and time.
Goal oriented optimization
Many websites we see online do not tell visitors clearly what they should be doing after landing their web pages. In an effort to give as much information as possible on the landing pages, websites offer too many options to the visitors which confuse them. Your landing pages should not try to please everyone because it will not help you increase the conversions. Focus on a single stream and optimize the page to ensure highest rate of conversion. Provide your visitors with information on the key action to be performed in the landing page and remove all the other factors that will distract the visitors from meeting that goal.
If you do not provide your visitors with clear options then it will increase the number of clicks and time required to accomplish what you want the visitors to achieve after visiting your website and you may lose a number of visitors in this process. Keep your pages simple and clear.
Creating Web Pages with High Visual Utility
It is not enough to have highly impressive web page layout or design. Your web pages should have a highly friendly layout in terms of functional utility. You must know the hotspots in your web pages that will grab the attention of the visitors without much effort. It should be in line with the general tendency of people on how they scan the web pages visually. You will be able to get help from Google Analytics, ClickTracks etc., on user activity based click tracking.
To ensure highest level of success come up with a template for your website you must first test the layouts and their visual utility. One of the ways of testing this would be to use PPC. You must come up with a number of layouts and test the campaigns to identify the best yielding layout. Though this is a time consuming part, it will certainly bring you a lot of benefits on the long run and increase the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns.
Design Guidelines
When it comes to website design and layout, there are no rigid rules as to what can be done and what cannot be done. However, what is important is to come up with designs that are highly productive. Here are few common factors that will help:
- Whitespace enhances readability of the pages.
- Short paragraphs and bulleted text are easier on the eyes.
- Appropriate headings and subheadings help.
- Color blocks get the attention of the eyes.
- Human faces and forms too get the attention of the visitors.
The ultimate aim is to get the visitors perform the key action that you desire.
