PPC advertising has many components that need to play together to be successful. One of the components involved is the landing page. First of all it should be called landing website as a single landing page website type of target will get you a low quality score and a high cost per click (CPC). In most cases this would make your efforts unprofitable. Building a landing page can be considered an art and often outsourcing is the way to go. I ran into the following website www. getlandingpages.com (no affiliate link + nofollow applied) and looked at their samples on their website. I like what they have done and pricing seems to be reasonable. I have not yet tried their service, so I do not know how these landing pages convert. Have you? Would be great to hear from you. Feel free to post a comment.

Anyway, what needs to be included into a landing page website? Well, the entire website should have at least 5 – 10 pages. The more, the better. In those pages you should have a “sitemap”, an “about us” page, a “contact us” page, as well as a generic “main page” or “index page”. That would be the bare minimum you will need. You also need to include links from your actual landing page to at least 2 other pages of your website, so that the customer has a choice. Here is the problem. Usually you do not want to give them a choice other than going to the merchant and eventually convert to a sale. The art is to include the links in a way that the PPC program bot (example: Google Adwords bot) is satisfied finding a link, but at the same time making the link as difficult to find as possible. There are several ways to do this. You could use CSS to mask the link to the other pages to show up like normal text and not to be underlined or in a different color. You could also strategically place the link at the very bottom of your landing page buried under many page breaks and displayed in a way not to motivate a click. No matter what these links to your other pages of your landing website should open in a new browser window leaving the landing page open. For me is working well the following. I build my landing page and then I use that page as a template for all other pages. My landing pages are filled with keywords and good text that matches the keywords in my PPC campaigns as good as possible. There is often a graphic/image up on top and then text underneath. As I use this as a template, each page of my site (if that domain is dedicated for that one single purpose) is pretty much a landing page with the purpose to convert the visitor to a lead. The only thing I change is the text on each page. So far this has worked out good and my quality scores are usually good or great.

Here is an example of a landing page of mine for ringtones. This is not the full-blown thing as you can tell, but I can mention here that I took that same page and use it as a sample to build an entire website around it. Each of the pages looks the same except for different text at the bottom. If you look at the page the majority of the content that is above the fold animates to sign up for ringtones. Anything below the fold (or page break) is not really considered good for the purpose of converting to a lead or customer. As this is just a demo domain, you can rest assured that the real thing is actually carrying Google Page Rank and even ranks considerably well in search engines. Important is that you still provide a) unique content and b) something of value even though your main goal is to sell ringtone downloads.

So, when thinking landing pages you should actually think landing websites.