This week we will focus on making a landing page so that we can drive the behavior of traffic how we want.

If you have been following along with our weekend projects for the last 18 weeks you should have some traffic coming to your site from forums and search engines. Now that we have traffic it’s time to decided what we want to do with that traffic. I am sure most of you would just push them to your home page and hope they are interested enough to dig deeper into your site, the truth is most people click to your site and then click off. Not all traffic is created equal so remember that if you are posting to a forum that you should send those forum users to a specific landing page.

Take for example if you were to post on a technical forum you know that these users will be familiar with technologies like RSS or Twitter and might be a better way to capture there details by letting them opt-in to following you. These technical users will not be likely to provide an email or personal information as they do not wish to be spammed.

This weeks project is to write 3 landing pages for your top 3 referring sites. To find your top 3 referring sites you will need to review your Google Analytics stats. You will find those details Traffic Sources area in the Referring Sites sub section. Now that you have your top 3 write a landing page for each. Keep in mind that you can push these people to parts of your site you feel would fit their needs, ask them to sign-up for an RSS feed or sign-up to a newsletter.

From time to time your referring sites won’t be able to inbound links you can edit. If that is the case you can use .htaccess to redirect visitors to the landing page. Here is an example…

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www.)?twitter.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://bluefur.com/twitter/index.php [R,L]

The above if added to your .htaccess will redirect anyone visiting from twitter to a specific twitter page.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.