Your landing pages should look like 
the rest of your marketing campaign.  

The text content of most optimization or doorway pages is built around a few relevant keywords and keyword phrases.  You probably use Word Tracker or a similar resource to select high traffic KWs in your niche category.

SEOPs rules usually allow you to optimize for two or three KWs; Pay Per Click lets you tie dozens of KWs to a single page.  Most e-comm operators use both.

What happens during the few seconds a mouse spends eyeballing your landing page drives your conversion rate and ultimately your revenues.  

If your brand name happens to be Le Petit Chat ("the little cat" in French),  you may build optimization or doorway pages for Google, MSN and Yahoo around a dozen or so keywords.  You may put a few dozen product shots on each page, along with prices, a little sell copy and an "add to shopping cart" button.  If ±4% of KW-visitors buy something, you're ecstatic, right?

 

Here's the fundamental economic issue:  

It is excruciatingly expensive to push any brand name into people's brains. It is much less expensive to pull sales out of a generic keyword that IS ALREADY IN THOSE BRAINS.

So after a while you notice that you get the highest traffic and sales from a phrase such as "creamy gruyere french cheese."  

Wouldn't it make sense to build a landing page around that proven-effective phrase?

 
is your corporate brand.

is what people want.  Why not try to brand that KW phrase?

Branding a Keyword in the legal sense raises a host of trademark and copyright issues.  In the Practical SEOPS sense, though, it's mostly a design issue since the "brand" will exist only on your website.  The little logos above are my feeble attempts in Corel.  More talented designers can make a keyword phrase look like a brand that has been around for years.  

The rationale for doing so is pretty obvious.  If lots of people are out there searching for "creamy gruyere french cheese" they'll be more likely to see and respond to a formal presentation of those words than if they simply appear somewhere in content copy.

If you have three high-traffic KW phrases for your gruyere, consider whomping up three logos, each existing only on its own landing page.  All three pages can point to the same SKU on your shopping cart page.

Actually, what people really want is 
not a collection of words, is it?

is what you show on-line, along with verbiage about weights, unit prices and shipping costs.

is what people want.  How about adding a free recipe for onion soup?  Or suggest some good wines to go with your gruyere?

Make Your Ads & Landing Pages Look Like Each Other.

Get the people who make your ads to design landing pages full of the same mouthwatering graphics you use in your ads & flyers.  Most web writers are very good at HTML, JavaScript, and other code languages. They think in terms of tables, text, jpegs, gifs and links to elsewhere.  

Most art directors are good at Image-making.  Get them working together.  Bill Bernbach, one of the founders of Doyle, Dane, Bernbach, recognized the value of putting writers and art directors together in the same room.  The time has come to put them together on the same page.

This is what Le Petit Chat manufacturers:

This is what people want to eat:

Content is King.  (Well, Content was king. These days Conversion if King.)

But content is not all verbal.  (This page would be deadly dull without illustrative photos!)

Once you identify your top-producing keywords and phrases, start making your landing pages look more like ads and less less like automotive parts catalogs.

More than half of US on-line shoppers use DSL or better connections.  Use that bandwidth to display graphics that whet the appetite.

Simplify your corporate homepage.  More pictures, fewer hyperlinks to every department in the corporate empire.  OK, that opens up a kettle of internecine worms.  If you can't Slickify the home page, don't advertise it.  Build super slick landing pages that lead like Greased Lightning to your superslick Shopping Cart and Check Out pages. 

EXAMPLE: Quality Smith promotes www.1800QUALITY.com and the same phone number to attract homeowners who need  fast competitive bids from residential contractors. (The Commercials.)

If you run an ad, make it look like your landing page.  Use the same pictures and copy.  Put a thumbnail on your homepage linked to that landing page.

If you can get just two of those corporate communication silos - ad agency and webmaster - working together, you'll be way ahead of 95% of your on-line competitors.

• Practical SEOPS.

• Branded Landing Pages.

• Key Worded Ad Copy.

• How to Track 1-800 and Click-to Response.

• Life After Google.