Should I optimize my PPC landing pages for the organic search results?

• I'm in the process of developing landing pages for future PPC campaigns. Should these pages be linked from other pages in my site, where appropriate, in the hopes of ranking them in the organic search results?

Answer: Most marketers block their PPC landing pages from being indexed by the search engines for the following reasons...

• Duplicate content — Often you'll have many landing pages which are nearly identical, with you swapping out small sections of them. For example, you might swap out some text to make it match the keyword that the user was searching for when they clicked your ad.

  So your Minneapolis dating page and your Chicago dating landing pages might be nearly identical, you've just replaced the word Minneapolis with Chicago . If all these pages were indexed by search engines for organic search, you would have a duplicate content problem. But with PPC that's not an issue.

• Testing and Conversions — In PPC, you're constantly going to be testing different layouts, colors, call-to-actions, hero shots, and so on to maximize your conversions. It could look a little weird to the search engines if your page has a totally different title every time they index it.

  But more importantly, PPC pages sole focus is on conversions, which can make them hard to optimize for SEO. Also, the tracking URLs you use in your testing can create additional duplicate content problems.

• Limited-time promotions — If you're offering something for sale or some other special promotion, once that promotion ends it's easy to remove it from your PPC campaigns. It's not so easy to remove that page from the organic search results, and long after the promotion ends you could still be getting customer traffic trying to take advantage of it.

If none of the reason...