Jill,

I work for a nonprofit retreat center for which our main offerings are (you guessed it) retreat programs. Until recently, whenever we sent out email flyers about our programs, we had the link go directly to the program's unique page on our website. Our marketing director has been trying to make a case for sending the clicker to the landing page that would then direct the clicker to a list of programs, including the one on which he or she clicked.

His reasoning is that they will see more of what we are offering. I've argued against this — when I click on something, I want to go right to it. I don't want to have to find it amongst a bunch of other things. I am wondering what you have to say about this in terms of user preferences data.

Deborah

P.S. To somewhat address the marketing director's concern, I was wondering if we might have a link on each program page that allows a viewer to go to the landing page to see more programs of that sort, e.g., yoga programs. Does adding that extra linking intra-site help us in any way with search rankings?

Jill's Response

Hi Deborah,

I can speak only from my own opinion on this, but I agree with you. If you put out a flyer about a specific program, to me it makes the most sense to send people to the specific program page. That seems to be the standard way of doing things with pay-per-click (PPC) ads, for instance. As I understand it, you'll see the most conversions when the clicker is directed to the exact info they were hoping to see.

As to your P.S., yes, I would recommend linking to the other programs from the landing pages, for sure. But as long as the landing pages contain your main navigation, the visitors can still learn all about your other programs as well, which I believe should suffice.

In terms of the search engines, linking to pages within your site is a way of giving them importance. The more pages on your site that link to any given page, the more important that page is deemed to be in the eyes of the search engines.

Jill

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