The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

A few months ago, Clickable Guru Hanny Hindi blogged about basic SEO best practices that help boost landing pages for paid search.  In my post, I'd like to explain how these same best practices will benefit not just your paid search and SEO efforts, but also your visibility on social media Web sites like Facebook.

SEO professionals will tell you that all landing pages on your Web site should have the following attributes:
•    Topical, specific, and targeted to particular keywords. If you want to get organic traffic for the keyword "Minneapolis lawyers," you need to have a page that's about Minneapolis lawyers, which actually contains the phrase "Minneapolis lawyers" in it.  Simply being a law firm and being in Minneapolis won't cut it.
•    Title tags based on the specific page topic. The title tag is to your organic search listing what the headline is to your paid search listing -- the big blue link at the top.  Put your topical keywords into the page's title tag.  In the title tag of your Minneapolis lawyers page, the phrase "Minneapolis lawyers" should be front and center.
•    Meta descriptions. The meta description of your page is like the description portion of a paid search ad -- in an organic search listing, it is the black text under the title. The meta description of your page should relate to the specific topic, and provide a descriptive summary of the content found on the page.

Suppose you are Smith Hanson, LLC, a law firm serving the Minneapolis / St. Paul area.  You want to have topical landing pages, title tags, and meta descriptions, which would give you organic search listings like these.  Note that because people often search for services like attorneys by location, it is important to have separate pages for Minneapolis and St. Paul, even if a single office serves both locations.

Following these best practices is not only good for your SEO efforts, it will help boost the landing pages for your paid ads as well.  The paid search providers will crawl your landing pages and determine if they are sufficiently related to your keywords.  Having separate landing pages for "St. Paul lawyers" and "Minneapolis lawyers" with specific tags and content on them will improve the quality scores of both landing pages for their respective keywords.

However, there is an additional benefit to following these best practices, which is that title tags and meta descriptions are utilized when your links appear on Facebook, as well as other social media sites.  When someone posts a link in their Facebook news feed, Facebook will automatically pull in any appropriately sized image from the site, as well as the title tag and meta description, which produces newsfeed items like this one:

What's terrific about Facebook news feed items, from a marketing perspective, is that they are posted by a reader’s trusted friend, and the actual language that appears is written by the site owner. By creating good title tags and meta descriptions, you can dictate the appearance of links to your Web site on Facebook.

But why should you, as a search marketer, be concerned about Facebook?  Well, for one thing, Facebook is on its way to eclipsing Google and Yahoo in terms of total visitor traffic. And more importantly, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks are becoming an increasingly important way for people to find information.  In fact, Facebook will soon release a new search feature, and is laying the groundwork for a future in which people don't search for "anonymous" information on Google, but search for the trusted opinions of their friends within Facebook. (Check out this recent article in Wired about Facebook's plans.) 

3 years from now, when someone searches their friends' news feeds for advice on "St. Paul lawyers," Smith Hanson, LLC will want to be there.

Best practices for online traffic acquisition don't change with the modality.  As advertisers, we may shift our focus or budget from SEO, to paid search or to social media, or to whatever else comes next, but the same best practices apply. Create targeted landing pages, and include relevant content and meta tags.  If you do this, no matter what the traffic acquisition modality, you are sure to achieve your goal of connecting an interested consumer with exactly what they're looking for: your products and services.

Ehren Reilly, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

A landing page should make an offer. This statement should seem so utterly obvious, so breathtakingly