A key metric in measuring the effectiveness of your website is "bounce rate." This number is the percentage of visitors who immediately exit your site, without making any other clicks. This is essentially a measure of how attractive the Back button looks, compared to your site. In this article, we'll take a look at how to develop effective landing pages and reduce your bounce rate.

Whether you're aware of it or not, your site has landing pages. Even if you didn't specifically design landing pages, you have them, because the definition of a landing page is "the first page that visitors hit on your site." In other words, where they land.

For many of you, your home page is your primary landing page, but an increasing number of website owners are specifically designing landing pages that bypass their home pages.

The concept of landing pages works because it is often more effective to take visitors directly to the information they're looking for than for them to drill down through layers of navigation.

Landing pages are typically used when you have an understanding of who the visitor is - usually determined by looking at what he or she clicked on to arrive at your site. For example, a visitor who clicks on an ad for your Deluxe Widget probably doesn't want to click through three layers of navigation to get to the information on that product. This same principle also applies to webinar or other event registration pages and details of special offers.

Similarly, a visitor who clicks on your link from an article you submitted to a consumer review site is likely to be very different from a visitor who comes to your site after seeing your late-night infomercial. It's not that one visitor is necessarily any better than another, but not all visitors are looking for the same information.

Once you have an understanding of the nature and interest of a specific visitor, a landing page can be used to provide exactly the sort of information that will interest that visitor.

Technically, this can be accomplished by directing infomercial viewers to www.yoursite.com/infomercial, whereas banner ads for this month's special offer automatically link visitors to www.yoursite.com/specials.

Landing pages, like the rest of your site, should be carefully measured to determine their level of success. As mentioned above, bounce rate is a key metric for landing pages. (See Table 1.)

In addition to bounce rate, you should have determined some sort of "next action" that you consider a success. Your next action might be purchasing a product, requesting more information, downloading a paper, signing up for a free trial, or the like.

Divide the number of action takers into the number of visitors to find your "conversion rate." What constitutes a good conversion rate will be determined by the nature of your page. According to research, typical lead generation conversion rates are approximately 3 percent to 5 percent; typical e-commerce numbers are 1 percent to 2 percent. Effective sites should be shooting for at least double those typical numbers.

There's a concept inherent in building effective landing pages that I call "alignment." The more aligned your source (where the visitor came from) and your landing page, the higher your conversion rate is likely to be (assuming that you are aligning around the correct value proposition, of course).

I have a friend who runs a very successful beauty products company and does a significant amount of Web marketing. My friend has found that if a banner ad shows a particular product, the landing page has to feature the same product, or conversion rates drop drastically. This is alignment in action.

Overall, I think there are a few key emotional points that a landing page needs to address in order to be effective. Your site must provide:

Recognition. This is when your visitor experiences a "that's what I was looking for" moment when he or she hits your landing page.

Credibility. Overall, your page must come across as risk-free. In other words, no red flags should be present, such as low-resolution graphics, excessive use of a default font like Times Roman, lack of contact information, typos or poor grammar, or failure to use industry jargon correctly.

Persuasiveness. Your landing page must do an effective job at persuading visitors that your product or service can help them achieve their goals. Remember to consider what drew the visitor to your site as a key in understanding what he or she is looking for.

Action. To turn a visitor into an action-taker, you must spotlight some sort of action that can be taken.

With this in mind, here are some key principles to observe when developing landing pages.

Create instant affinity.

The top half of the first screen visitors see (in other words, the top 300 to 400 pixels) should be used to create an instant confirmation that the visitor has arrived on the right page. Consider using taglines, images, and what I call a "positioning statement" (basically a longer version of a tagline, usually about 12 to 15 words) to establish your stake in the ground, and let your visitor know exactly what the site is about.

Use specific headlines and subheads.

Using a distinct page headline and subheads throughout the page can give a visitor an understanding of your information at a quick glance. This will help the visitor decide to actually read the text, or which sections of the text he or she is interested in. Obviously, the longer your page, the more necessary this type of "chunking" becomes.

For the headline, remember the importance of alignment mentioned above. Make sure your headline matches the ad (or whatever) the visitor clicked on (to arrive on the landing page) as closely as possible.

Focus on a specific goal.

It's true to say that a landing page can really only accomplish one primary goal. Typical goals might be a lead capture mechanism, such as a free demo or product trial. Or, the goal might be to entice the visitor to click further into your main website. Either way, focusing on the goal will make for the best results.

Having said that, I do think a landing page can often support a secondary goal. For example, ideally you'd like visitors to purchase a product, but having them sign up on a newsletter to receive special offers by e-mail might be a secondary goal.

Use multiple calls to action. No, this isn't a contradiction of my advice to focus on a specific goal. I'm talking about making multiple calls to the same action. This is especially critical on a long landing page. If your page doesn't go below the fold, there's probably no need for more than one call to action. In general, I'd place one call to action above the fold, and one at the bottom of the page - the final word, if you will.

Use effective layout and graphic design.

How you use graphic design and layout will be as varied as the products you sell and the markets you serve. There are, however, some design principles that just make sense. Here are a few:

• For readability, keep text columns narrow - probably no wider than about 80 characters - and left-aligned, not centered.
  
• If you're selling a product that can be displayed, feature a picture of it (often called a "hero shot"). Make sure the quality and clarity of the image is good.
  
• Images will tend to draw people's eyes, so place key text (probably the offer) below product hero shots or other appealing graphics.
  
• If your offer requires the visitor to fill out a form, consider placing it directly on the landing page rather than requiring a click-through to the next page.

When you consider the cost of sending additional traffic to your site, it makes a great deal of sense to maximize the impact of the traffic you are already sending. Increasing landing-page effectiveness is an area of low-hanging fruit for many Web marketers. Changes are often simple to implement and far-reaching in their impact.

Mat Greenfield, a consultant, author, and speaker, has been in Web marketing since 1998. He is recognized as a website conversion expert by industry organizations, including Register.com, Constant Contact, and InsideSales.com. Mat can be found online at www.ConversionResults.com.