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There has been a lot of talk lately about landing pages, but a good deal of it is written by and for affiliate marketers. They talk about having landing pages that are not linked to the rest of the website and direct the visitor to either “convert” or leave the site. In this way, they can key in on specific costs and results from their specific form of business.

However, if you are not affiliate advertiser, this is not what you are trying to achieve with your website, so I don’t recommend emulating what they do. What is good for them is not necessarily good for the rest of us who do business on the web.Since your website is already well-optimized for your main keyword terms for hospitality websites, we suggest creating additional pages that are relevant for each specific supporting keyword term for which you would like to rank.

These will be your landing pages. Using “Eureka Springs honeymoon” as an example, you could:

• Create a page that explains why Eureka Springs is a great place for a wedding and honeymoon.
• Show photos of weddings and happy couples. Give links to churches, chapels, preachers, photographers, videographers, dj’s, caterers, musicians, limo services, florists, the Justice of the Peace, etc. and ask them all to link back to you.
• Tell visitors the license requirements to get married in Arkansas or link out to a place that gives that information.
• Make recommendations for romantic restaurants, moonlight boat cruises, strolls along the lake, and other activities that might appeal to newlyweds.
• Tell them why your property is the best place to honeymoon - quiet, privacy, luxury, romance. Show them photos that convey this.
• Insert quotes from, and photos of, happy honeymooners who have stayed with you.
• Tell them about famous or infamous Eureka Springs weddings or noted couples who have married or honeymooned there.
• Talk about your “honeymoon special” and assure them that a honeymoon at your place will be one they will fondly remember. Keep in mind that most people aren’t looking for a bargain on their honeymoon. Instead, offer extras like breakfast in bed, flowers and champagne waiting in the room, floating candles in the hot tub and a cd of romantic music they can take home with them .

The resulting page will then be a perfectly-themed, ideal landing page for anyone searching for “Eureka Springs honeymoons” and arriving at it through either paid ads or the organic listings.

Think about the kind of things that bring visitors to your area - sports teams, amusement parks, hiking trails, NASCAR tracks, colleges, museums, golfing, skiing, bird watching, gambling, visiting historic sites, etc. Then, begin establishing your website as a good source of information on those topics by creating well-optimized pages about them.

Use landing pages in this way to build content, gain links and deliver the kind of relevant information that the search engines reward and searchers crave. With every page you add, you gain the opportunity to attract more visitors to your site. By making the pages completely relevant to the search term which was used to find it, you have a very good chance of keeping people on the page, getting them to look around elsewhere on your website and eventually making a reservation with you.

The loud voices of some of the affiliate marketers are really making a buzz in the search engine marketing world and it’s sometimes difficult to tell which of their techniques are useful outside of that realm. Make certain that when you create landing pages, you do it in a way that makes sense for your industry, your business and your visitors.

Mary Bowling - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

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Categories: Featured Articles, SEM, SEO.
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