When working with an online marketing firm, you’ll hear a lot about landing pages.  Why aren’t they just called website pages?

We call them landing pages because it’s a more definitive way to convey the purpose. Someone may land on the page you told him to visit.  Maybe you can secure a link from another website and point it to a particular page.  Maybe you should buy some ads through Google and designate a page that you hope is persuasive enough to generate a lead or a sale.

It’s unlikely that any page on a website will be as compelling as the next.  Sure, you can add your phone number on every page.  Or, sometimes you may see a response form throughout the website.

But a landing page in the strictest sense has a very limited role.  Its job, if designed well, is to convince someone to do something.  Many companies make the mistake of designing a website and then driving traffic to a page without adapting the page to achieve established objectives.  In other words, the page should be designed to accomplish a very specific goal.  In some cases, you may not even want the navigation to appear.  If you just bought an ad on Google and someone clicks to a page, maybe he should be making a phone call for filling out a form based on that page information.  He shouldn’t have to wander around a website to make a decision.

Some executives I’ve spoken with seem concerned that they will pay for clicks and connect with searchers through the page only to have many of the new visitors abandon the page and move on.  It seems like a waste of money to them.  The truth is, if you get 100 visitors to a page, and 10 of them do something, that’s pretty successful. What’s your website marketing strategy?

Web site marketing is often about education. Committed to helping businesses understand online marketing, World Synergy recently released a free guide, “How to Grow Content that Search Engines Crave.”

Used effectively, the guide can be an online marketing solution.

Business executives still seem to think that they can rank #1 on Google just because they want to appear in the #1 slot.

It’s not that easy.

Many factors come into play – from web site age to the domain name. It’s almost a cliche to say that Content is King.

The truth is that content really does matter. You can want to rank for a keyword all day long, but that desire won’t make it happen. You have to become aware of what’s happening.

Do you have just one mention of a keyword on a page? Is your page short? Is it long with a lot of different priority words? In other words, does the keyword you’re targeting get lost in a wide assortment of phrases? How does the competition rate for the same keyword? What’s in their favor – a good domain name, a page that’s been around since the beginning of time, or an architectural advantage – maybe the  keyword is part of the navigation.

It’s paramount that you size up the facts and the realities of your situation before you think about devising a strategy to support the very keyword phrase you need to see at the top of Google. Get advice from online marketing experts.

I put together a handy list of 13 activities that can ruin any SEO program.

Check out the piece at Web Pro News called “13 Ways to Sabotage Your SEO Opportunities.”

Of course, there is always the big one – ignoring SEO during a website development project. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

But there are a dozen other topics as well. There are lots of Web SEO tools available on the Internet. The article may not be a calculator or a subscription service, but it has more than food for thought.

At times I’m a little blunt, a little unorthodox. That’s my style. More and more, I just want to tell things like they are. One of the 13 is about business owners. If a web site has failings, if the business kind of messed up, maybe it’s time to admit the error in judgment and dig team (financially) to remedy the situation.

Sure, buy or try your standard set of web SEO tools, but it also helps to think about strategy as well. It helps to make sound business decisions. That’s not always about whether to do SEO at all. It’s a matter of who know how to do it in-house, who can be trained (and what confidence you have that they know what they’re doing), whether to go with an outside consultant, etc.

It’s really easy for web marketers to tap into a couple of tools and give companies a quick report about a website.

World Synergy ignores the norm and is offering custom web site audits – actual evaluations of a website from multiple angles.

And guess what? I head up the assessments as Web Strategy Thought Leader at World Synergy, an online marketing firm offering a full range of other Internet and IT services.

We have a good approach and a format that makes helps us offer our feedback in a way that makes sense for marketers and business executives. And we even offer a phone consultation to review our findings that cover:

• Design
• Programming
• SEO
• Calls to Action
• Inbound Links
• Rankings