What is a landing page?

A Landing Page is designed to deliver the maximum information possible, on a single page, with no navigation from that page other than to your website, or your sales offer. I will explain more deeply below

SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is undergoing serious changes due to the advent of AI and its ability to search deeply and quickly.

Back in the day of music on CDs and waiting for movies to come in the mail, SEO was borne of words that would attract interest.

If you wanted someone to find your website, you would fill it with “keyword” so that the search engines would find it.

Let’s say you were a fashion photographer in Shreveport. You would fill your copy with the keywords “photography”, “Shreveport”, and “fashion”. These were the terms that would hopefully be used when a client was looking for a fashion photographer in Shreveport.

For whatever reason they would be searching for that.

And, basically, that was what we all did and it served us well all the way up to about three years ago, and then more recently about last month or so.

SEO could make or break our operation. We bowed to it, we excoriated it, we had a love-hate relationship to it.

But we did it consistently. We built it into our footers, page descriptions, image descriptions, meta-tags, and everything we could.

But now, AI is looking deeper.

And we have to do all that stuff as well as make sure the page has information that Google (and Bing, etc…), see as being valuable for the searcher.

And as close to a relevant search as one can find.

Photographers, unfortunately, are not big on lots of words on their websites.

“We let the images speak for themselves”, is a great way to have them be muted and unheard since search engines do not look at images, they track words.

This may change in the future, and there are some signs that it already is being used in places like Amazon Photos and Google Photos. But it’s probably going to be a while before it gets to the general population.

So what do we do?

We get a landing page, and we design it to make it do what the search engines want it to do.

The first thing we do is to name our page for the search terms that we believe we want to capture when someone is looking for what we do.

Let’s say that a person searching for a fashion photographer in Shreveport goes to a search engine, most likely Google, and decides to input their search.

“Fashion photographer in Shreveport” gets entered.

And all the logarithms kick in and the SEO of your image descriptions and such get indexed and all that magic behind the scenes takes place, and that photographer’s page…

Doesn’t come up.

Yeah, that happens a lot.

We can do all the work, use all the right words, and all the techniques that we have available, but it may still be lacking.

(“Well, why don’t they just look for John, since he is the Shreveport Fashion Photographer?” Good question, but the answer is simple. If they already know that John exists, they don’t have to Google for the category, they simply google him.)

But here’s something to think about.

What if John had a webpage titled: Best Fashion Photography in Shreveport with a site URL of www.bestfashionphotographershreveport.com

Google will see that fast.

And at one time all you had to do was create this address and “forward” it to your website.

Yeah, that is not working so well now. (You can do it once, but more than one becomes a negative for your ranking.)

But if that page has a few interesting things that make that page informative, and you have done all the traditional SEO strategies that we normally do, your chance of being seen is much higher.

So we build a site to reflect what Google wants to see:

What you have above is what is usually called a sitemap. Most sitemaps have all the additional pages linked to it, but we are only making a single one page website called a “Landing Page”. So consider this a small sitemap, a distribution of assets and a base for us to build out what is needed and to see the flow.

To the right is what is called a wireframe. This is a basic design and look and feel of the website. It indicates where the assets we have chosen will fit on the page, and the general design of the assets.

There are hierarchy issues, and flow issues, and readership issues.

We cover all of this, how to make and design a sitemap and a wireframe, and how you can use these tools to help your clients with their web needs.

Who needs a landing page?

Every a and medium business needs one. This is how you draw interest to your website. And whether you build it under a new domain, or build it into your own site, the landing page is the best opportunity for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that a photographer can have.

Why a One Page Site?

You will end up with modules of design you can use on other sites by simply changing the colors and images. This leads to faster implementation and less time iterating the same three column module.

Understanding the basic infrastructure of websites

Understanding the basic infrastructure of a web page is fundamental in creating a seamless user experience. 

Building and modifying a full website design

Bring your vision to life, weaving together design and functionality into a single, captivating web page.

Friday, September 27, 28, 29, 2024