SEO Best Practices: What are 3 best practices for optimizing a landing page for organic traffic?

1) Clear and clean conversion paths. The goal of the landing page is to convert every visitor into a qualified lead (I'm making the assumption we're dealing in the B to B market). People shouldn't have to think to much when they hit your page...their choices should be readily apparent. If confusion exists in their minds, your ability to convert them decreases dramatically.

2) Relevant Offers. In order to get a prospect to give you their contact information, you need to provide value in return. A relevant whitepaper is a typical inducement in B to B, though it could also be a spec sheet, series of testimonials, special offer, etc. Whatever the offer is, it must resonate with the needs of the audience...a poor, irrelevant offer will hinder the sales funnel and ultimately lead to decreased revenue.

3) Relevant Copy. There will likely be two types of people visiting your landing page: Marketers & Technical Types. Many marketers don't understand very technical language and techies aren't looking to read sales/marketing copy. The language of the landing page needs to speak to the diverse needs of both camps of people because frequently, both participate in the sales process.

1. The landing page should be populated with well-written copy that has been created with the human reader in mind. This copy should not contain jargon or unnecessarily complex words or phrases in order to allow readers for whom English is not their first language to read or put into a translator and understand. If well-written, the copy will include a good page description and keywords. Alt image tags and image captions should be included, again, constructed for the human reader and well-written to include identifying keywords.

2. Keyword research, using any number of free or paid tools, such as Keyword Discovery or the Google AdWords tool, must be done on a regular basis in order to ascertain how people search on specific keywords and how much competition there is for specific words or phrases. Use the information to define specific keyword phrases that target the exact audience for your landing page. For example, if you are selling "Shoes", it will be virtually impossible to rank in the top 10, however with reasearch you may discover a phrase best suited for your content, like "men's shoes over size 13" with little competition where you could have a high ranking fairly quickly. This is an area for due dilligence that should be done before proceeding to #3.

3. The Title tag should be well-written, clear in meaning and contain the most important keyword(s), ideally, less than 100 characters. Reference: http://www.metatags.org/html_tag_title_tag. The Meta content tag guides how the content will display and Meta Description tags will frequently be used in the Search Engine Results along with the page copy as the summary description for the landing page. Reference: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-wonderful-world-of-seo-metatags

I have followed the "white hat philosophy" of Jill Whalen of High Rankings (http://www.highrankings.com/) for many years and have consistently produced excellent rankings for my company. If you have produced well-written pages for your human audience, practiced strategic linking and search engine marketing activities, are active in social media and diligent in your keyword research, you should have excellent results.

1. Have an offer that grabs the audiences attention. Give something away in return for what you want. It could be the visitor's email address as an opt-in or you want them to click through to your main site. Whatever the situation is you have a minimal amount of time to grab their attention and probably even less with a landing page so give them something worthwhile in return for what you want. Additionally if you are asking them to "subscribe" don't make it a painful subscription by requiring them to fill out pages of information. Email and name are usually enough to satisfy subscriptions, address and phone number requirements tend to turn people off for two reasons; they don't want to give out personal information and the effort involved is too great for the reward, so they simply don't do it.
2. Content on the page should have a clear call to action leaving plenty of whitespace between main points. In general people do not read web content they scan it. Write your content to a reader who scans the page. Brief, bold, short statements that grab your attention before they click off the page and you've lost them forever. The content should also be organized with short paragraphs and as brief as possible.
3. Stick to one topic, product or focus per landing page otherwise your effectiveness becomes diluted. Either way if they came from organic search or pay per click your visitors are very targeted since that is how they found you, so your odds of a conversion are better if you stick to that one product or focus that sent the traffic in the first place.

1. The Basics. Start by doing as much keyword research as you can to pick the right keywords. It will take you just as much time to optimize for keywords that will be extremely difficult to rank for or bring the wrong type of visitors as it will for keywords that will mean great returns. If you have the budget for it, paid search is a great way to gather this data quickly. Once you've selected your keyword or keywords (all things being equal, I'd target just one term plus maybe a geographic or other modifier to that core keyword phrase), make sure you do the basics that for the most part the reader won't even notice, except when it enhances the content: title, header ( and or lower) tags, meta description (for increasing click through rates), and url. If you get those right and use the keywords in a natural, non-spammy way, you're off to a great start.

2. Be Awesome. Chances are you have an expertise on a subject that you can exploit. If not, you probably won't be in business very long. Don't give away trade secrets, but you can write up an excellent how to that people will not only read about, but print out or bookmark or forward to friends or link back to, which leads to...

3. Get Links. Not just to your home page - build links to this internal page that you're optimizing. Quality of site, relevancy of subject matter, and quantity of links all help. When you've written something awesome - something that is incredibly useful or linkbait in the truest sense of the term, getting links will be a ton easier.

Bonus: Convert. Don't get so focused on increasing traffic that you forget why you're doing it. Use a call to action and make it easy for people to take that next step. People have come to your page because they hope you'll solve their problem. Demonstrate that you can do so and turn that traffic into something meaningful.

1. Instant Impact Message - Don't try to say too much on your landing page.
Have an Instant Impact Message, that states the problem your target
customers are facing and how you can solve it, in an easy to read and
compelling phrase or sentence, followed by a call to action.

Secondly, you have got to list the features of your product or service and
highlight the benefits in a concise and compelling manner by focusing on how
these features solve the pain points of your target customer. Make it easy
to scan and read in a bulleted format preferably.

2. Keyword Integration - Integrate the keywords that you are optimizing for, in
your page titles, H1 header tags (headlines), as well as in the areas that
are not visible to humans but to search engine spiders, such as your meta
tags. Integrating your keywords in key areas will help you in two ways. The
first to get you found by search engines, but secondly to convince prospects
that they have arrived at the right place when your keyword is found in the
meta description, page title and on the headlines on your website. The
reinforcement will make for better conversions. In marketing you say it once
and then you say it again and again.

3. You Have Got to Have a Pull - Your website must offer something that entices
your visitors enough that they are willing to exchange their information in
exchange for this information. This can be a Free Consultation, Free Video
Tutorial, Free Trial, a Free Report or a Free Gift. Only 10% of people that
make initial contact will purchase. The key is to capturing their
information so that you can continue to nurture them into a sale, by
educating them about your product or service, and becoming more credible in
their eyes.

When optimizing a landing page for organic search, presumably you've chosen a keyword--or a small group of closely related keywords--and optimized elements like meta tags and on-page headings accordingly. Three additional tips to make your organic landing page really stand out:

1. Think about who is searching - and write for that person. The keywords you've optimized for are the "what" that is being searched for, but don't neglect to consider the "who" as well. For example, in the b2b software world, it's common to have both a technical buyer and a business buyer. Who are you targeting with this page? Make sure to use the language that person speaks in.

2. What is that person expecting to find? Again, thinking about who is doing the searching, and the specific search term they are using, try to write the ideal answer to that query. Remember, the goal of the search engines isn't to reward you for doing good SEO work, but rather to deliver the most relevant possible content for every search. Focus on providing that content and you've won a good part of the SEO battle.

3. Include a call to action of course, but before doing so, ask: what is the most logical next step for my searcher to take? Is it to make a purchase? Request pricing information? Download a white paper containing more detailed information? The closer your call to action matches what your hypothetical searcher will logically want to do next, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Crawlability: If the page isn't crawlable, it won't rank. Check off your list of: is the page in your sitemap, is it linked to from other prominent pages on your site? Are other sites linking to your page? The more ways a spider has to crawl the page the more likely it is to get indexed and pulled into the search results.

Convert: Look at your search traffic, find out what terms are driving traffic to your page. Validate any words you were hoping to convert are in that list. If not circle back and analyze who is ranking above you? what are they doing? How do you get some of that traffic? Also convert existing traffic, are you doing a good job of driving SEO traffic deeper into your site? Ranking on a highly competitive word is worthless if 80% of people leave the page without completing the desired task. This is why sometimes long-tail terms are better terms than broad generic terms.

Creative: Be creative. Try something new. Google I think said they tweaked the algorithm over 200 times last year, and they look at over 200 indicators for ranking factors. Try and think of other elements that may give you a leg up. Don't be afraid to make changes even if you have a number one ranking. The search engines are changing all the time, by being stagnant there is no guarantee you will lock up that number one position forever. Tweak and improve the page with a customer in mind. Circle back to the convert idea, Also be creative in ways the page could be promoted. Be creative in your link building. Think of sites you can promote a page on. The nice thing about good link building campaigns is that they not only boost SEO, but they should also drive some incremental traffic to your site.

1. Fill Your important web Pages With Keyword-Rich High-Quality Content

2. Use H1 & H2 Tags as headings to Make Your Landing Page Standout

3. Strategically Placed Calls-To-Action

In addition to using attention-grabbing headlines, sub headlines and high-quality content, visitors must be prompted and encouraged to take the next step. By placing attention-grabbing calls-to-action, for example an arrow pointing to your lead capture form or instructions in bold text, you will be on your way to increasing your conversion rates.