Website Design - Does your Landing Page Send them Packing?

The landing page is so crucial for visitor retention, not to mention their return and a bad website design that is not optimized to keep visitors can ruin your online efforts. A landing page is the page that visitors first land on when visiting your site either from search results, or from any links to your site. Usually it's the home page, but it's actually any page that is linked to and from where visitors can get to your website.

Also, it is important to realize that while we, who are webmasters, understand websites and navigation on a deeper level, you always have to assume that your visitors are complete novices and they need obvious and clear indication within the website design of what your site is about, what's there and how to get there.

The landing page is really the "first impression" of your site and its content.

Website Design - Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your website clearly defining what you are offering?

2. Is there some kind of welcome message or post that explains what's there?

3. Is the content reflective of the title and description?

4. When visitors land on your page, are they easily able to navigate to different sections and pages within your site?

5. When they land, are they met with valuable relevant information or do they have to muddle through a ton of adds, like Google Adsense and banners?

If you answered NO to any of these questions then you will have problems with keeping your visitors and you can bet that they will not return.

Remember that the Internet revolves around the ease of getting information, if a surfer has to jump through a thousand hoops to find what their looking for on your website, believe me, they won't, and why should they? There are millions of other sites that are designed in such a way that they will find what their looking for with ease.

Don't let a bad landing page, bad website design and navigation set-up affect your online business and Internet marketing efforts.