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.

This week based on some requests of customers we will adding some PHP code to our site to redirect users based on the search engine details.

This first example will allow you to display a greeting message based on the search engine. You could also use this to display ads to specific search engine users. For example Google users are said more likely to click on Google Ads because they recognize them. Where someone that comes from Digg is most likely not to click on Google Ads. Add the following code to welcome Google users…

<?php
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if (strstr($host,”google”))
{
Print(“Welcome google user. Thank you for visiting our site.”);
}
?>

Now you can modify this script to show a custom message based on a keyword…

<?php
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if (strstr($host,”server”))
{
Print(“Looking for a server? Look at our server offerings”);
}
?>

Lastly you could modify the script to output the keyword in your message if the user used Google like this…

<?php
$host = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
$s1 = explode(“p=”,$host);
$s2 = explode(“&”,$s1[1]);
$keyword = str_replace(“+”,” “,$s2[0]);
if (strstr($host,”google”))
{
Print(“Looking for $keyword? You will find more $keyword information here.”);
}
?>

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we went through and added a backup MX record so that we would ensure emails would not be lost.This week our goals it receive feedback and traffic to our site. There are a lot of webmaster forums that allow you to join and submit your site for review.

This weeks project is to submit your site for review to at least 3 forums. The more you do the more traffic and input you will get on your site design. To get you started here is 3 forums that provide good feedback…

SitePoint
Webmaster-Talk
Ozzu

If you find anymore that you think are work sharing please post them in the comments.

Last week we worked on adding our business to Google Map to drive more local traffic. This week we will drive more traffic to our sites by modifying our signature. Everyday I get over a 1000 emails from various people and of those only 30% of them have an effective signature. Every signature is unique and you can add as much information in your signature as you want.

What I recommend to everyone is that you should add a small teaser or fact at the very bottom of your signature with a link to your site. Something like this…

• Find out why 10,000+ Canadians do business with us at http://www.yourdomain.ca.
• 800+ pages of tutorials, articles and knowledge online at http://www.yourdomain.ca.
• Did you make our top 10 sales questions? – Find out at http://www.yourdomain.ca.

These teasers in your email will drive potential customers, current customers and anyone you email to your site. If you have a large company if everyone uses a teaser then the traffic impact can be significant.

This weekend sit down and think of a good teaser to add to your current signature. If you need help as always post your issue in a comment.

Last week we focused on securing folders and using various methods to do that. This week we will focus on adding our business and website to Google Maps. Google Maps has a way to search for local businesses in your area. The idea is similar to a yellow pages online making it easier to find businesses in and around where you live. The more businesses that are added to Google Maps the more useful Google Maps will become.

To get started you need to sign-up for a Google Account.  Once your Google account is setup you can add your business and site to Google Maps. The process takes about 10 minutes to complete. Be sure to fill in as much detail as possible.

Once you are done a postcard from Google will be sent by mail. This can take anywhere from 6 or more weeks. In the postcard you will be provided a link to visit and validate your listing. It is important to do this so your business is added to Google Maps.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.

Last week we created Landing Pages for our top 3 inbound links to shape the actions of our traffic. If you did not do this then I suggest you go back and see how to do it now. This week we will look at how to push traffic from countries to a specific page or site. This can be useful if you want certain country prices to be shown or if you have only certain services that are available in specific countries.

To do this project we will be using the MaxMind GeoIP Country Database. You can purchase the IP database for $20 a month and can access their database through an API.

After you have purchased the GeoIP Web Service from MaxMind you can use the following code to redirect for a specific country…

<?php
$ipaddress = getenv(“REMOTE_ADDR”);
$license_key = “yourlicensekey”;
$query = “http://geoip1.maxmind.com/a?l=” . $license_key . “&i=” . $ipaddress;
$url = parse_url($query);
$host = $url["host"];
$path = $url["path"] . “?” . $url["query"];
$timeout = 1;
$fp = fsockopen ($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
if ($fp) {
  fputs ($fp, “GET $path HTTP/1.0\nHost: ” . $host . “\n\n”);
  while (!feof($fp)) {
    $buf .= fgets($fp, 128);
  }
  $lines = split(“\n”, $buf);
  $country = $lines[count($lines)-1];
  fclose($fp);
} else {
  # enter error handing code here
}
if ($country==’CA’)
{
header(“Location: http://www.bluefur.com/canada/”);
exit;
}
else
{
header(“Location: http://www.bluefur.com/index2.php”);
exit;
}
?>

Place the above code into your main php index page (index.php). You will need to move your current index.php page to index2.php for this script to work.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.