With Topic landing pages, persistent navigation is the key to success
The key to success is to send users to landing pages that are specifically designed to fulfill their goals. Any page where there is a direct response transaction — whether or not money is exchanged — is a landing page. For every type of direct response transaction you initiate, there should be a landing page waiting for the user that is optimized to maximize its conversion rate.
A topic landing page, as the name suggests, is a page on a website that is about one particular topic, or category. This page is usually found in a site’s primary navigation, either on the right or left hand side of the screen. Occasionally, a user may also find topic pages in the horizontal site navigation, just below the nameplate, if the number of topics is limited (3-5). Topic pages are also often referred to as category pages, or section pages.
A topic landing page can be as simple as the topic label and a list of articles, or it can be as elaborate as the topic label, a list of articles and all resources about the topic. It is a portal to all the information a website has relating to that particular topic. Most websites have 5-35 primary topics, which are usually directly correlated to 5-35 primary keywords and their keyword cluster.
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Some sites use topic pages as well as subtopic pages. For example, MotorTrend.com has a topic page on “New Cars” and a subtopic page on “New Acuras”. Here is a MotorTrend.com topic page on “New Cars”:
MotorTrend.com Topic Landing Page
Persistent Navigation
The key to persistent navigation is to help the user find anything on the site, fast. No clicking about, desperately hitting the back button. Make it clear where they are, and how to get somewhere else. Persistent navigation strategy includes:
- A search content or quote box.
- Top, right or left navigation bar with links to topic pages.
- Topic index pages with deeper content presented as bold headline links, with photos, to highlight feature stories.
- Within an article, the breadcrumbs indicate the article’s location within the site.
This is a topic page from Mequoda.com on “Landing Pages”:
Mequoda.com Topic Landing Page
