22 features for awesome SEO landing pages

Last year, our product development team set an ambitious goal: to make LiveBall the very best software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for deploying SEO-friendly landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites.

As the disciplines of SEO and conversion optimization continue to intertwine, we feel there are two key capabilities that conversion optimization solutions such as ours should deliver:

1. Organic boosting. When testing landing pages for paid media campaigns — which is what most conversion optimization tools emphasize — marketers should be able to enjoy additional organic traffic as a “bonus.”

Why not double-dip? If you’re placing a great ad and associated landing page on a particular keyword, by all means, enable it to rank organically as well! At the very least, any SEO link juice acquired by experimental and campaign-specific pages should be transferrable as much as possible to your core site.

2. Organic building. For most marketers in SEO, you have two choices for testing new ideas: (a) add a page to your web site; or (b) make a post on your blog. The former can get mired in information architecture and IT issues that drag it down. The latter is fast — but you’re constrained by the blog format.

LiveBall offers a third option (c): quickly deploy satellite landing pages, conversion paths, and microsites that are optimized for SEO keywords that you either want to test — or strive to own. It’s a hybrid: the format flexibility of a web site with the speed and independence of a blog.

To enable both organic boosting and organic building, we turned to four of the leading experts in SEO — Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie C. Stricchiola — and their authoritative book The Art of SEO.

Starting on page 263 of their book, they describe 27 features that they would want in a super SEO-friendly content management system (CMS) — in our case, a landing page and microsite optimized CMS.

Taking their advice to heart, we made sure that our new release supported all of their wish list that applied to landing pages — 22 of the 27 features they describe. (The other 5 only apply to blogs and catalogs, or we would have supported them too!)

• Title tag customization and rules: YES
• Static, keyword-rich URLs: YES
• Meta tag customization: YES
• Enabling custom HTML tags: YES
• Internal anchor text flexibility: YES
• Intelligent categorization structure: YES
• Pagination controls: N/A
• 301-redirect functionality: YES
• XML/RSS pinging: YES
• Image-handling and alt attributes: YES
• CSS exceptions: YES
• Static caching options: YES
• URLs free of tracking parameters and session IDs: YES
• Customizable URL structure: YES
• 301 redirects to a canonical URL: YES
• Static-looking URLs: YES
• Keywords in URLs: YES
• RSS feeds: N/A
• Tagging and tag clouds: N/A
• Multilevel categorization structure: YES
• Paraphrasable excerpts: N/A
• Breadcrumb navigation: YES
• Meta NoIndex tags for low-value pages: YES
• Keyword-rich intro copy on category-level pages: YES
• NoFollow links in comments: N/A
• Customizable anchor text on navigational links: YES
• XML sitemap generator: YES
• XHTML validation: YES
• Pingbacks, trackbacks, comments, and antispam mechanisms: N/A

Thanks to Eric, Stephan, Rand, and Jessie for giving us such a clear target to hit.

If you’re interested in more details, click through to the SEO landing pages feature page for LiveBall.

Comments

[Pat @ Software for Small Business]

That list is excellent and a good way to check every page on the site. I'm just interested at the inclusion of the NoFollow comments for blogs. There seems to be some debate as to whether it make more sense to have DoFollow comments instead. I wonder if the inclusion of some of the other items (e.g. breadcrumbs) makes a significant difference to ratings and traffic - or is it just good practice?

[Scott Brinker]

In the context of landing pages, blog-like comments aren't usually applicable. But I think it's good to give people control over follow, index, and archive directives to search engines on all pages in their online marketing portfolio, so that depending on their content and SEO strategy, they can sculpt appropriately.

[SEO Company Pune]

great enriching post. must prove helpful for many. a real must read article. Thanks a lot!!!!!