Marketers and advertisers new to the web often do not understand that promoting a website is more than building up a great home page. The step many business owners are forgetting is to drive these new visitors to a specific landing page that is not the homepage.

Marketers often start building links to the homepage only to find months later that the conversions just are not happening.

Okay, so what’s a landing page? It is the exact opposite of a homepage. It could be a sales letter for new software, or it could be an opt-in page for subscription. Or, it may be an informational piece that highlights one of your products.

Rather than trying to show everything you have to offer a landing page is designed with one purpose in mind. [spin] While these kinds of pages look very different form one another, they all have this in common: they are designed to do one thing, and only one thing. The page is designed to pass visitors through and perform one task: click through, sign in, or cash out. If they don’t want to, they drop off the page.|

Landing pages are important for online businesses because they make the web site more accessible by search. They are different than the homepage which is more like “everything and the kitchen sink; instead landing pages are focused for one or two key terms or phrases.

Most online businesses have several landing pages, and some have dozens, depending on the scope of services they offer. So there is a built in logic that landing pages are essential and effective, but also risky. Therefore it’s best to learn about some landing page strategies before expanding the footprint of your website.