Sounds like a simple question but the truth is that most businesses owners don’t know and most web designers have stopped asking.

Most websites have become over grown with so much junk that it’s difficult to even figure out what there about, much less there purpose. I’ve seen landing pages that make me feel like I’ve just walked into a crowded store and have 50 salesmen all trying to sell me something at the same time.

The idea is that you create a certain type of landing page for each type of traffic source you are using. Now there are a lot of ways to set up a landing page, for example a landing page can be part of your main site and have the same navigation and page layout as your main site. A landing page like this can be several layers deep built into your main site.

We can also build a microsite that is built around a specific topic. This type of site is designed for a specific audience. A microsite usually has a couple pages of supporting information but the whole site is designed around getting you to do a specific task, rather that task be getting you to make a purchase or apply for some kind of information.

Even though it is a microsite it can still be branded as part of your main site.

Another type of landing page is a stand-alone landing page. This page gives your website visitor one option and that option is either to purchase something or leave. It’s also normal for these pages to have an exit strategy of some sort, like an exit pop up.

As I said before there are a lot of different types of landing pages, and it really depends on the type of traffic and product as to what type of landing page will benefit your business the most.

However, another thing that is good about landing pages is that you are able to track all your traffic going to that page. This means that I can run a Google ad campaign and know which keywords are converting and which ones are not.

This allows me to track my ROI at the keyword level. With this type of traffic I would go with a stand-alone page as there are fewer distractions, and the page can focus on exactly what the web visitor is looking for. In most cases, fewer distractions mean more purchases.

One thing that I would do with the stand-alone page is add some navigation to any important pages on the site that might help with the purchase decision.

You have to look at every page as an entrance page, like a door in the mall that people can go through to get to your store. While the main door needs to be tailored to everyone that is entering the store the side doors can be tailored to the exact department you are going into.

Single products or services are great for stand-alone landing pages. I am sure you’d be surprised at the number of products that have been sold with nothing more than a one page sales letter.

Micro-sites work best when there is more supporting information needed to make the sale. Microsites are great because they work totally separate from your main site and focus totally on the needs of the website visitor.

Now what I want to do is separate the content that is mission critical from that which is just there for the icing on the cake. Mission critical would mean that the page is needed to make or increase revenue. This would exclude things like company mission, job opening, management bios and things like that.

When doing this keep in mind that a meaningful transaction doesn’t have to be the main conversion goal. There are all kinds of small steps that create a psychological momentum towards the end goal. We want to build on our level of trust before getting them to the main conversion point so every click or move in that direction can be counted as mission critical.

What you should have now is a list of mission critical parts that can be tweaked and fine-tuned for better conversion, as well as a list of distractions that we’ll need to look at later.

First thing we want to do is look at the content and ask ourselves if this content helps to deepen our relationship with the website visitor?

We also want to ask ourselves what affect the content would have on the site if it was removed. And who is this page designed for, prospects, clients, business partners, potential partners or competitors?

Your site should be tailored towards potential clients or partners if you are looking to make money with the site. And each critical mission goal on our list is a conversion point that we need to reduce friction on, allowing a visitor a squeaky clean in and out process.

Any action the visitor takes on our site that is measurable and has value will be considered a conversion point.

I’ve placed a blog on the main page of this site and have been blogging about website designs and what inspires me about web designs. So much so that I decided to take the site lick worthy and start posting inspiring web designs on that site.

But that got to me to thinking about this blog and how it’s been neglected so I’m here to try and get this blog going again as well.

Guess I’ve got a lot of thinking to do if I’m going to start posting on this many blogs.

One of the things I’m very proud of is the design we’ve been using. I’d be willing to say I’ve got the best looking silicone wristband website in the business. Our call to action is in your face yet so tasteful that it doesn’t bother you.

The site is optimized for the search engines yet looking at the site you’d never guess. It appears to be designed with only the user in mind.

I don’t know of any other site online that has 5 call to actions above the fold yet blends in so nicely with the design that they don’t stand out. I believe a call to action should be nothing more than an easy to find link when the site visitor is ready to make a purchase. We’ve just started playing with both the site and the affiliate marketing yet with the little time we’ve been able to put into the site it’s making us an extra $5,000.00 or more per month.

I’m proud of my little affiliate marketing business and hope to be able to put a little more time and effort into it this coming year.

When someone is selling SEO as a service and targets a keyword like Mean Cash Internet Marketing I have to wonder why. About the only reason I can think of is for showing a client how well they rank for a particular keyword.

Mean Cash Internet Marketing is not a competitive keyword and it should be fairly easy to rank for.

The amount of traffic it will bring in is nothing. That means that targeting the keyword and trying to rank for it is a waste of time, even more so when you target it on the home page of your site.
Normally the home page is the most powerful page on your site and the title tag is the most powerful tag on the page. When a so called SEO expert uses that real estate to target a keyword like mean cash internet marketing it either means they have no idea what they are doing or that they want to show how good they are by showing a ranking. Since they are unable to rank for a competitive keyword they pick one that has nothing to do with anything and has no competition.

Someone looking for a company to do SEO on their site should be very careful of people using this tactic. It’s nothing more than a con because anyone can rank for mean cash internet marketing. I wouldn’t be surprised if this blog, which has almost never been used is able to rank for mean cash internet marketing.

So we launched our search engine optimization site, and it is like nothing you’ve seen before.
I’m writing the content for the site now.

It’s a step by step guide on how to make money online. The idea is that you can either use the guide and do it yourself or pay us to do it for you. It’s going to have a lot of the techniques that allowed us to start making money the second we launched a site as well as techniques that allowed us to make money without ever launching a site.

We’ll also be discussing some link building techniques that most people do not like to talk about. It should make for an interesting read.

However, the fear of failure, ridicule, risk and the fear that everyone will see were not perfect, causes us to hold back on the things we truly want to do.

I’m not perfect, English is not my first language, I’m a high school dropout and I learn daily from my mistakes because I make them by the minute. And before the end of the day I’ll regret making this post at least a 100 times or more however, I want let fear get the best of me. Nor will I take the time to try and be perfect, I don’t want to be perfect, I just want to be me.

I’m sick and tired of reading the so called gurus talking about how they make a thousand bucks a day and yes, I buy their products in hopes of learning one thing that will help me get to the point that I know there not at.

And I’m even more tired of reading post from SEO’s that claim to be white hat and points to anyone that has a different approach and calls them black hat.

I read a post http://lateralaction.com/articles/black-and-white-thinking/ that shows two images both the same color however, one looks black and the other looks white because of the items around the images.

I believe the job of the SEO’s, marketers, and website owners is to give the end user the site they’re looking for.

Anything else is black hat.

And like those images, white hats have shades of black and black hats have shades of white and at the end of the day were all the same color. But like the images we hide our colors with the things around us.

I saw a graph http://www.indeed.com/salary/SEO.html the other day that showed how much in-house SEO’s make. It’s really sad and rather disappointing to see such low levels of pay for someone that should be making the business more money but I guess you get paid what the owner of the company feels you’re worth.

I own a web design business and do pretty good online however; I’ve got lots of repeat clients that allow me to sit back without having to chase down new clients. But I wouldn’t mind changing that in the coming year. I’ve also played a little with affiliate marketing in the past year and have rather enjoyed it as well.

I’ve been making my total living online for the last 5 years. But I have to wonder if I was hired as an in-house SEO (not that I have any desire to do so) could I show I deserve more than what others are making.

I personally believe that steady jobs are something kids will learn about in history class.
Security lies in taking responsibility for improving our skills, our reputation, and creating opportunities were others see nothing.

The best way to do this is by working with others. Can we take a site from zero to a profit of over $30,000.00 per month?

Can we do what the so called gurus only talk about?

If I didn’t feel like we could I wouldn’t be making this post.

With Christmas coming up and the end of the year it’s a tough time to try and test something like this. However I’m thinking about doing just that.

The site architecture structure is one of the things I’m really depending on to boost the rankings and put the site in the top ten for my keywords. I’ll use the site architecture to focus on my most important keywords as well as control the flow of link juice and insure the ability for the search engines crawl.

Let Me Explain a Little More.

I’ve started by evaluating the top 20 sites that are currently ranking for my main keywords. I’ve studied their navigation to find out their primary topic scheme as well as look for any secondary navigation schemes. And I’ve looked to see if any of the competition is going after the same secondary and primary topic schemes.

I’ve made a list of their title tags as well as their primary and secondary topic schemes. I’m learning more and more about were their bread and butters at.
I’ll run the heaviest traffic areas through my main navigation. This will allow me to run a navigation structure that will point the most juice from my site to the most important pages. This is my core navigation.

Secondary Navigation

I want to keep all the pages no more than three clicks form the home page. This will insure that all pages are crawled regularly. It will also help me to achieve both clarity and focus throughout the site.

While this is an important part of the site navigation, the real power is in the ability for me to focus on my main money pages while using the less important pages to boost those pages to the top of the search results. Each time someone clicks on the main navigation the secondary navigation down the left side changes. The secondary navigation focuses on the keywords related to the main navigation.

One of the things that I’m currently concerned about is the fact that visitors normally become confused when presented with more than five choices in the site navigation. For this reason I’ve separated the sections into categories and placed headers above each category.

I’ve also done my best to place keywords in the links as well as the headers. This is good for both my site visitors, as it brings clarity to the site, and for the search engines, as it gives them something to feed on. As the site grows the secondary navigation grows allowing the main site and main navigation to stay the same.

Main Navigation

Depending on what the money topics are I can move the topics around in the navigation keeping the main money topics closer to the top. Feeding the spiders as well as giving the site visitors what they are most likely looking for, first.

CSS

Because Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) gives me better control of styles like spacing, color, font, etc. we designed the whole site in CSS. CSS gives me more flexibility and control of the exact page appearance; from precise positioning of the layout to specific fonts and styles.
CSS is a cleaner code and makes the site easier to update as well as giving the site a faster load time. CSS requires less code compared to table designs. This makes the code lighter and cleaner.

CSS and SEO

CSS automatically makes the site SEO friendly. HTML code can reduce the accuracy of the results while CSS is much cleaner and the search engines have a much easier time working its way through it.

The cleaner code will result in better search engine rankings.
I’m also able to control what the search engines see first. Making the main content of my site show up above the header and navigation menu in the site; showing the search engine crawlers the importance of my content.

I’ve seen many website get a boost in rankings after going from an HTML website to a full CSS web site. I’ve also noticed a lot of tools in the past couple years that show code over text ratio of your site. The reason for this is because Google, Yahoo and MSN love light-weighted websites. They want to see your content; the text, not the code. For this reason we went with a full CSS site.

Website Accessibility

CSS also makes the site more accessible. We are currently working on an additional CSS document designed for handheld devices like cell phones, which will be called up in place of the regular CSS document; this is not achievable with a table layout.

Increase Download Time

CSS code downloads faster than tables giving us a much faster download time then we would have if we had gone with a table design.

Bleeding

A page want lose page rank because you link out, but linking out does affect the level of page rank available to pass to other pages. For this reason we have used the No Follow tag throughout the site to control the amount of page rank being passed from one page to the next.

An easier to rank page does not need as much juice as a hard to rank page. The No Follow tag allows us to pass just enough juice to a page to get it to rank and then flow the rest of that juice to a page that would be harder to rank.

Cross Referenced Navigational Structure

We are currently working on the content of the site. We are planning for over 20,000 pages of content and will use those pages to rank for different keywords as well as to reference back to the main pages of the site.

A link from a page that is on topic with the page it is being linked to and is surrounded by content that is also on topic will get a boost. For this reason we are using the content of the site to help boost the rankings for our main keywords.

There are lots of other things currently going on with the site but this should give you a good idea of the direction we are heading.

Not long after the insentient I started getting phone calls from concerned potential clients about rip off reports being filled against by company. The customers had names I’d never heard off and there was no way for me to contact anyone to find out what was going on. Rip off Reports, refuses to remove any information once it is posted on their site, unless you want to pay some money under the table. That’s how they support their business.

I wasn’t about to pay money to have a list of complaints from fake customers with fake names that I knew nothing about removed. I decided to go about running my business and ignore them. However their tactics are a bit sneaky, they target the company’s name, something that is easy to rank for and get’s the company’s attention pretty fast.

I’ve since done my best to ignore them, however, I was once again attacked by the competition over a misunderstanding about a site that I did not own nor had anything to do with. The company in question thought I was attacking their name and decided to return the favor by attacking mine.

We got the whole thing sorted out but I decided it was time to put an end to all these attacks. My next couple post on this blog is going to be talking about the steps I’m taking to protect my name and to keep the competition away from it.

It appears that everyone has moved into the blogging arena and the forums are left with a lot of the “why has my site lost it's ranking” post. And the number of blogs make it impossible to even begin to find all the different views on the subjects at hand.

I decided to find the best marketing blogs online and pull their RSS feeds back to my forum to make it easier for me to keep up with the latest changes. As members, we are able to find and respond to the post that we feel are worth someone else's time.  

Like this morning funbiz pointed out a post that I knew nothing about http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/forum/viewtopic.13717.html

If you have a blog about social media sites, search engines, or marketing and feel that the community could benefit from what you have to say, send me your <a xhref="http://www.geeksonsteroids.com/forum">forum user name</a> and blog RSS feed and I'll set the forum up to pull the post from your blog and put a short description along with a link to your blog on the forum.

Thanks for your time.

Janeth

A black hat is the villain or bad guy in an old western movie. He is the character wearing a black hat in contrast to the hero’s white hat. The phrase is often used figuratively, especially in SEO slang, where it refers to a technique that breaks search engine rules. Google says that white hat SEO is someone that would write copy, give advice on site architecture and help in finding relevant directories to which a site can be submitted. Anything else would be black hat.

While copy is very important, without links going to that copy, no one will ever find it or read it. And no matter how good the site architecture is, without some outside influences it want make any difference. And I am all for submitting sites to directories but the truth of the matter is, they have very little affect on getting a site to rank.

Here’s my two cents on white hat and black hat.
White Hat SEO

A white hat SEO charges you money and gives you very little in return. At best you get a website where they have optimized your copy and then submitted to the online directories as well as set up a good internal linking structure. All of this is important but it is not going to over flow your pockets with cash.
Black Hat SEO

Depending on how black they get, it can get very dark. They can build you a list of 50,000 keywords, put a bot together that grabs text from different sites, mixes it up, making it unique and then builds a page for each of those keywords, optimized for the search engines, over night. They have blogs and other cloaked sites as well as a site set up on every free hosting site online in place for linking to these sites. They can have you tons of good traffic coming to your site over night. You can be making money in a week’s time, if you have a good site that will convert the traffic. However, you stand a chance of your site getting band from the search engines a week later. All the traffic stops and no one wants to touch you.
My Thoughts on SEO

I build my sites for the site visitors and market them for the traffic. It’s Google’s job to make their search engines work, not mine. I’ve got no desire to build sites and cloak pages, not because it is wrong or want work but because I do NOT want to get a site banned. However, I agree with building a list of keywords and creating a page for each of those keywords with unique content one each page. I also agree with setting up an internal link structure that will let you pass the highest amount of pr to your best pages with your keywords for those pages being used as anchor text.

A site with 10,000 or more pages can even allow you to rotate your keywords for the internal pages.

But it’s all a waste of time if your site does not convert the traffic.