Landing page – how to create and optimize them

What is a landing page?
The landing page is the page that appears first when a person clicks and follows an advertisement. As such it has great importance for the visitor impression and further actions.
The landing page is critical for an advertising campaign conversion. Even if you spent a lot of money and time in advertising your product, if your landing page is poor, you won’t receive much profit of all this.

Several tips for better landing page:

• Make your landing pages easy to navigate. Make sure your visitors can easily purchase the offered product or do the required action without any complications. There is no point to have fancy and complicated landing page where no one can do the required action – purchase your product or service, register for your newsletter or anything else.
  Make your landing page fast enough – don’t put big images or other media that will slow the page loading or load it gradually. Your landing pages must load fast or your clients will got bored and will navigate away.
• Provide enough information for your product either by information on the landing page or link to the information page for it. Be creative when describing the product and don’t forget that people hate to read long, boring documents.
• Use images to describe your product. The first thing people see on a new web page are the images. Choose appealing images of your product or people enjoying it and you will be the winner.
• Hire a professional designer to create your landing page template. First impression is very important when you work with people. Your landing page template must be good enough to ensure that you are serious enough about your product, service, etc. Don’t dirty your landing page with popup windows. Focus the visitor’s attention at one point – your offer.
• I’ve met some landing page tutorials that suggest you to remove the navigation from your landing page. The idea behind this is that your visitor won’t have options to navigate away from it and will do de required action. By my opinion it is a little harsh – people can always close the browser window. It is better to offer full and reliable information rather than removing the navigation.

Further reading:
Wikipedia article - Landing page
Google Landing pages guidelines