I have been reading more about how important landing pages are in the process of converting users. This was mostly related to PPC where you could control the page that the person lands on. Where you get the traffic via SEO and land on your homepage, this might be from lots of different source.

What I am wondering is should I design like 5-10 different homepages, when some one comes to the home page. Depending if they have visited before (cookie), what is the refer (from google, another site), what user agent (possible treat IE users different to firefox users). So if they come to the page with searching for different key words (determined by looking at the referrer header) then show the homepage that is best designed for what they are looking for.

I am looking at making a better user experience and improve conversion (give users what they are looking for).

Now the question is do I just show different homepages, or use like a 302 redirect to a page that is relevant to why they are visiting. While I think this would be a lot better for the users, are google going to treat this as cloaking and penalize me. Since what the bots see would be one of the landing page, not necessarily what the user sees.

Yes that would be my question. Will you be penalized for doing this. I am curious to see what the gurus say.

Best, Nicci

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Nicci
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This is loosely defined as cloaking or IP delivery and there is much discussion as to whether it is approved by the engines or looked upon as spam. Usually, "cloaking" is bad, but "IP delivery" is acceptable.

Still, the engines could look upon this as spam regardless. They want to see the same version of the page that the visitor does, which in at least 1 case (from your description) they would.

Here's a suggestion:

Test the various pages on another landing page that is less trafficked than your homepage. Give it a few weeks to make sure it has been spidered & cached. If it doesn't appear to have been penalized, then you could try it on the homepage.

Sorry I can't provide a more definitive answer... haven't done cloaking or IP delivery before. Trying to stay on the white side

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Hi Nicholash,

Short term you can get some really good results by doing this.

Long term its not a good idea - you do not want to get banned.

But reading into your post it seems you are confusing homepages with "content" product information pages. It would not be wrong to create several pages which provide valid content and information on the products you sell (and also contain a link to buy). Then to get them indexed (seen by googlebot) add such pages to your sitemap and to _relevant_ blogs, forums, articles, etc.

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Yes, this is traditionally considered as "cloaking", and is not worth the risk as it can get you banned in search engines such as Google. Much better as was said previously is to to build out different pages with the unique relevant content. Besides, the more content you show to the search engines the more relevant and authoritative your site might be.
Not only is content king but so is quantity in some respects with search engines so the deeper your site is the better I always say.
But this leads me to mention something in this regard because I see often where we spend a lot of time thinking about and developing pages related to "capturing" traffic, especially with the focus towards "landing" pages but often we are not doing the one definitive process that will most benefit us from that point and carry it forward and this is web analytics. If we are not capturing data to specifically understand not only where the person is coming from, what they were looking for, the path they take through our website, how long they stay on each page (page "stickiness"), and why they leave without converting or when and if they do convert what led them to that process, then our best efforts are simply losing the most effective potential for targeting we might accomplish otherwise. Just a thought worth mentioning.

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How do you measure the "stickiness" of a page?

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In web analytics you are measuring how long a visitor stays on a particular page, this is "page stickiness". This coupled with other data such as referrer, search term, entry point, path traveled, on-page conversions, etc, will help you to gauge whether a page or a site is delivering the relevancy or look or feel necessary to convert as high as possible or more accurately, tell you what you need to know in order to evolve the site to its highest possible potential.
In addition to parsing server logs, Web analytics employs certain server side processes in order to measure this data real time. Traditionally with web analytics you will place special codes on each page you want to measure utilizing java script although some use Ajax code or a combination of the two. The java script will notify a server that a visitor has landed on the page. Then the server utilizing special software will collect and process this information and output it in a file or perhaps a graph.
In addition, web analytics will place a cookie on the visitors computer. This cookie will then be able to tell us that a visit is unique as well as identify the return of the visitor (if they return), their path each time, how long they stay on pages and much more. This is just a general description of the process. My company employs this and much more sophisticated methods to collect and measure statistical data on behalf of our clients when we are conducting a search engine marketing and/or Internet marketing campaign and there are many other companies such as ours that offer professional web analytics services, although most of them in our opinion are rather expensive.
I don't know how a website can even expect to be truly successful and expand its business without practicing some form of web analytics as the data it provides is invaluable in helping you to understand what you need to know and do in order to increase your sites conversions, modify your site for the highest potential search engine representation and generally provide the best experience to your visitor.

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Hi Guys,
We needed to use Landing page as the best way of preselling our customers before our merchants sales copy sells them in total,
It is indeed one of the best ways of improving conversions,

This strategy works both for PPC & BUM as well as SEO.
Hope this helps to every one,

Regards,
Krishna

Not actually confusing it at all .. I am looking at changing like 10-50% of the home page depending on the source, to be able to better direct people to the best pages for them. This just mean that sometimes I will add a section to highlight other sections on the site and maybe remove information about other parts.

maybe post some examples? I dont much of an issue doing this at all, but like others have said if you start redirecting the bots to different pages than your users you will get in trouble.

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Hi
A home page is never considered as a landing page unless it has an opt-in form.Create a couple of landing pages that displays your products or has targeted keywords in it,and you can really test them.Which ever is effective and is working for you ,just finalize it.302 redirect is not a good idea as you may be penalized for doing this.

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I would consider the definition of the a landing page as any page that a user lands on to enter your site. Which would make you home page the biggest landing page you have as the majority of your traffic would be coming in to your site to the homepage.

The source of the traffic matters when I am thinking of conversions. I am against the bait and switch of totally different subject matter then what the user expects. But the user who comes in from a link via myspace, from a user who comes in from searching for product a in google, to searching from product b. You might want to treat differently. Maybe drop a cookie on there machine to say what touch points have occurred. That way they would get something that same regurlarly.

I mean I see it no differently then when google is personailizing there search results, they take cues from previous searchs as to what your intentions are. I am just saying if you take in the que of the referer and customize to those users. To be able to change the language to better suit that user, then that user will feel better to relate and more likley to convert.

if they came in from a search of product x, then you might have a banner space and highlight poduct x. Which would give them a direct deep link in to your site where they would want to go. If they came from searching for procut y. Why would I want to show them a promotion for product x, when I know they have come in for product y.

if you could also call product x 5 different names. (eg sneakers, runners, flip flops, etc) why would we not want to take the users cue and use the same terminalogy that user users. User B might call it something else so the page would be dynamic. Instead of nessarly passing paramaters in the url, it would be done by cookies.

visit here................
Digital Web Magazine - 11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages

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Whoa! Hold on a second. Cloaking has nothing to do with this at all and landing pages are loosely related at best. The deceptive tactic of cloaking hinders an engine's ability to correctly rank and categories a web property. Staying within the guidelines of the general premise of the site while showing visitors what they want is not cloaking.

Not only is this a good idea, you're behind the curve.

Any one who has used Adwords is familiar with dynamic keyword generation. You know... providing a default ad title or keyword and then inserting the user's search query if it fits. Changing the content of a homepage to cater to a visitors request is no different than this - it's just done on a broader scale.

Advanced web-dev 101...

@justgowithit...
Let me see if this explanation pans out (as cloaking):

You setup a website and alter text that is displayed on the page, based on the originating source (or keyword) of the visitor.

When a serch engine visits that page, they do not see that keyword.

Definition of cloaking:
Technique in which the content presented to the search engine spider is different to that presented to the user's browser.

The practice of altering the content is "cloaking" in the general sense, there is no doubt. The motive and intent of the strategies, however, can be argued until we're all blue in the face. The fact that Google does this w/ their ads further adds to the discussion about what is and isn't acceptable.

I have referenced several times before that Google supports cloaking by websites. If you're big enough, you can do whatever the heck you want... just keep lining Google's pockets. They look the other way on "IP delivery" and cloaking by the big boys every day.

Again, it is the intent that is the bigger issue... if you intended to deceive Google, prepare to be penalized for it. If you're trying to improve the user experience... good for you, hope you don't get penalized.

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If you resort to this process, you'll certainly earn a good deal of leads over time. But it can be that major Search Engine's will penalize you for doing this. It's similarly situated as what they call 'cookie-stuffing.'

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how is this related to cookie stuffing ????? cookie stuffing is referred to the process of dropping a cookie on a persons machine even tho the user never clicked through. This is a clearly fraudulent behavior I see no way how these could be linked ..