A lot of visitors need to be reassured that they’ve found the right place. Here’s a few great tips for optimizing landing pages:

• If you can choose your landing page (i.e. with PPC campaigns), don’t land your visitors on the home page. Land them on a page that relates directly to their search query. Repeat their keyword query on the page.
• Be wary of placing navigation in prominent screen space. If you land someone on a page, you want them to hear you message. You don’t necessarily want them to get distracted and wander off, at least initially.
• Make every word “tell”. Every page should have a primary objective, and every word on that page should move the visitor towards that objective.
• Consider using third party credibility indicators, like reviews. No one believes what marketers say anymore, but they often listen to people “like them”, or their peers.
• In E-Commerce, three dimensional buttons work. I resisted this one for a long time as I believed that text links were the best way forward, but my testing told me that simply wasn’t true. Visitors respond very well to raised buttons. I suspect the reason for this is that we’re conditioned to press buttons in the offline world. And very few of those buttons are flat, or text.
• Don’t believe everything you read on this topic Test. Test. Test. What works for others may not work for you.

The article has a lot more information, test results and links. A great read.

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