I Told You So

Posted On: 2008-01-16

Hey, I'm a female; I'm allowed to have an I-told-you-so moment now and again. It's in the rulebook for female behavior and now is my time to exercise my rights as a female to have one.

In 2006 I began suggesting that we needed to start designing our websites ... both here in adult and over in mainstream too ... so that every page was a landing page. Of course, many webmasters here in adult and web designers over in mainstream still think of the index page as the front door to a website but that is just so out of date.

None of the search engines have ever guaranteed to list your index page for all the search terms that might appear throughout your site yet so many still expect visitors to always arrive via the front door. The fact is that people can land on just about any page of your website whether they're coming from a search engine or from a link on some other site.

Every single page on your site should be seen as a landing page for people coming to your site because every single page can rank for something in the search engines. Even if your traffic is coming from a link on another site the webmaster of that site may link directly to the page that has the information that he wants to share with his surfers and you can't demand or expect that people only link to your index page.

Of course you will see some silly people demanding exactly that but then they have about as much hope of getting people to obey their demands as King Canute had of ordering the incoming tide to go back. So every page has to be seen as a potential doorway to your site.

And now mainstream finally seems to be catching on to that idea. Heck somebody has even paid Jupiter Research to look at where people are arriving on websites so now it's official, people don't always arrive on your index page.

Unfortunately Jupiter Research doesn't seem to have been able to produce some numbers but I'd be willing to wager that if the search engine optimisation for a site is done correctly then the chances are that the number of visitors arriving on an interior page of a website might be more than those that come in via the index page.

There are a lot of variables that can have an affect on those numbers so it's obviously going to vary from site to site but there is no doubt that we should be working towards making every page on your websites a landing page.

So how do you do that? Well Jupiter Research suggests that content pages - those are pages other than your index page - should have somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of page area dedicated to navigation and promotion. They suggest that the content should only take up another 20 to 30 percent, advertising around 15 to 20 percent and the rest of the page ... if you do have any space left over ... should go to other things.

What they suggest for those 'other things' is user-generated content. Here in adult that's rarely an option and even over in mainstream it's a bit of a two-edged sword so for us just plain old white space might be good for any spots on the page that we haven't filled with navigation, promotion, content and advertising.

And there is an interesting point - Jupiter Research obviously sees a difference between 'promotion' and advertising. While we rarely do any of what they might think of as promotion on our sites perhaps it's time we did think about something like that. Perhaps it's time to do another thing that I've been talking about for years; perhaps it's time to start branding our sites so that we can build up a trust factor with our surfers.

If they recognize that they've had good advice about which paysites to join from us before then perhaps they'll take it again and keep coming back to our sites for more good advice on which sites to join.

It's certainly worth thinking about ... unless of course you're one of those who will promote even the crappiest sites just so long as they pay you enough.

By the way, I really did mean that every page should be considered a landing page. If you're doing mainstream sites and you include 'about us' pages then be aware that those pages can be very important landing pages so don't forget to make those pages look just as attractive as every other page on your site.

And don't be as silly as some designers that I've seen and use a 'no index no follow' tag on those pages. That's just plain shooting yourself in the foot and that's about as silly as expecting all the visitors to your site to come in through the index page.