Do I Need New Domains For Landing Pages

[hartley]

Hi there,i am currently having my site rebuilt and would like to have 2 landing pages for particular products i make.Do i have to have separate domains for the landing pages or can i run them somehow from my existing domain.Thanks to anyone who replies.

[torka]

You can host your landing pages where ever you want. You don't need to register additional domains unless you just want to.

Do you want these landing pages to be indexed for search, or are you planning to use them for pay-per-click only?

--Torka

[hartley]

thanks torka,yes the whole idea of the landing pages for me was to have a couple of pages that were optimised (for search) especially for two of my catagories of products/artworks.I recently did the seo course on lynda .com and in the course he gives an example of landing pages but he doesn't use different domains so i was a little bit surprised when the guy rebuilding my site said i needed separate domains.He said it was mainly for better search.ps it is not for ppc,regards Ron.

[torka]

OK, the reason I asked if they were for PPC is that typically you'd want to exclude PPC landing pages from being spidered. You don't want those kinds of pages to be indexed because you only want people to find the pages from your PPC ads. That helps you measure ROI of your ad spend more accurately.

In your case, though, it seems as though you want the pages to be found through regular search, right?

First off, you should keep in mind that any page from your site is potentially a "landing page." The term simply refers to the first page of yours that a visitor encounters. So there's not necessarily any reason to build standalone "landing pages" outside your normal site structure.

The second thing to keep in mind is that in order for a page to get good rankings in search, it not only needs to have good on-page content, it needs links pointing to it. Links can come from outside domains, and they can also come from other pages on the same domain.

So, if you can integrate these landing pages into your overall site, that makes your job a lot easier. You can get links pointing to these pages from the other pages of your site (through the normal site navigation) thereby letting these pages share some of the natural link "juice" your home page probably has (for most sites, most of the "outside" links will be pointed at the home page, making it typically the "strongest" page on the site).

You can also try to obtain links from outside sites/domains pointing directly to these two pages. Back in the day when directory links were a big(ger) deal, this made for the one advantage of hosting landing pages on separate domains. Typically most directories won't allow multiple listings from the same domain. On the other hand, most reputable directories (those that have a chance of passing along any link value at all) don't generally allow single-page "sites" either, so if you wanted to pursue this strategy, you'd need to not only build landing pages, but entire "mini-sites," which turns into a lot more work.

If for some reason you can't (or don't want to) include them as part of your "regular" website, you can still link to them from your site where appropriate. In that case, though, you'll definitely want to pursue incoming links from other sites/domains, because these pages will probably need the extra boost in order to stand alone (unless you're in a very uncompetitive niche).

Does this help?

--Torka

[hartley]

Now there! is an answer,no wonder your buiss. is called the whole nine yards,thanks for that.It would seem that the benefits of separate domains are minimal at best.I also read that article on your site about keywords in urls and i think that is what my webmaster was trying to achieve,(better organic search results) but that article also says that the results are minimal and there is a price to pay on the other side.I am a bit of a newbie and what i really like about the digital world is being able to pose a question like this and somebody(who knows what they are talking about) takes the time to reply,thanks again,Ron