Landing Page

Technically, any page an Internet user "lands" on after clicking on a link is considered a Landing Page. Links could direct to the landing page from online marketing ads, an e-mail link, a search engine results page, or from another webpage (usually a promotional page that then links to the landing page).

Traditionally, landing pages were usually a website's home page. However, it soon became apparent that search engines often have difficulty properly indexing the homepages of websites offering a diverse array of products or services. It's difficult for a homepage to be well optimized for hundreds of keywords at once.  So, websites that sell a variety of products or provide diverse services often use landing pages to increase their PageRank. Landing pages are a way of giving website visitors specific information and offers upfront, rather than trusting that people who click on an ad will patiently wander through the website until they find the offer that that originally interested them. Ecommerce campaigns usually have a landing page specific to each ad or product.

Often, the term landing page is used in online marketing to refer to a webpage that is designed specifically around a particular service, product, membership sign up, or other offer. These pages are known as transactional landing pages. The other main type of landing page is a reference landing page. Reference landing pages are often used by government agencies, associations, or educational institutions to convey information to a targeted audience (i.e., a State government may have a reference landing page providing current tax information and links to further information for small business owners, corporations, and individual tax payers). Both reference landing pages and transactional landing pages are used in pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns such as AdWords.

Ecommerce gurus speak of creating the perfect landing page that will seal the deal. If specific landing pages are not set up, usually a website's main page will end up as the landing page for most web traffic. However, if a website visitor is searching for a specific product or piece of information (and they usually are), many of these visitors will loose patience and go somewhere else. The idea behind using Landing Pages in SEO and marketing is that you don't want to leave any incoming links to chance. Each link brings valuable website visitors who may become customers,

A landing Page is also known as a Lead capture page.