How to Create a Custom WordPress SEO Landing Page

Update. This post has been retired (the code isn’t kept up to date). Still worth a read though.

First of all, I should probably explain why I’m publishing a post talking in detail about some aspect of WordPress as a publishing platform. It’s because landing pages are often one of the main marketing tools for many online businesses, and since WordPress is the most popular website management platform then it all kind of works together…

The keyword there being “kind of.” That’s because landing pages are not a native functionality in WordPress and you have to do a little digging around in order to enable them for your blog business.

By the way, if you take a look in the archives here, you’ll find a post about custom WordPress archive pages, where I offer my archives template (the exact one I’m using on this blog). Don’t forget to check it out.

What is a landing page?

Some time ago, I published a guest post on Six Revisions about good landing page design. If you’re not interested in the design part then just check out the first couple of paragraphs of the article, where I explain the purpose and construction of a standard landing page.

In short, a landing page is a page that your visitors see after clicking on a specific link on another site. For instance, if you advertise your site through AdWords then the URL you link the ad to becomes the landing page.

The purpose of a landing page is to convince the visitor to take a specific kind of action. Usually, it’s to buy something or to subscribe to your mailing list.

Landing pages have been online for a long time now, and for a very simple reason – they work. You are always more likely to succeed if you try to sell a given product through a landing page rather than through a standard blog page.

Now, the exact topic here is SEO landing pages. What differs them from traditional landing pages is that, most importantly, they are meant to rank well in the search engines.

Problems with standard blog pages

The main problem with standard blog pages is that there are too many things that can distract your visitor from taking action, and also too many elements that are not relevant from an SEO point of view.

For example, things like:

sidebars,
headers,
menus,
Twitter links,
Twitter and other social media buttons,
other links to external sites,
big footers,
comments, and so on.

Even though these elements are often a must for a blog business in general, they are not that great for landing pages. The main trait of a quality landing page is simplicity.

How to get yourself a nice landing page (the expensive approach)

Here’s the expensive approach of getting yourself a nice landing page (in the next section I’m presenting a free counter-approach).

You can get a nice landing page along with a completely new theme. I know that changing the theme of your site might not sound like the most attractive thing to do, but just hear me out.

Updating your theme to something modern is often the only way to get the possibility to use the newest features in WordPress (which every next version introduces).