Hi OJ,

I'm sure John will weigh in on this with more detail, but for things like paid traffic, you only want to use the squeeze page.  After people opt-in you can send them to your blog site (homepage) all day long because you will now have the opportunity to interact via email.

Just as a general rule, any cold traffic (non subscribers), paid for or otherwise, should be directed to the squeeze page in order to establish that foundation for controlling the interaction.  If they do happen to find your blog site via the search engines, you should have some mechanism in place to convert that traffic to subscribers (opt-in box on the sidebar), but a the squeeze page is designed with sole function of conversion in mind.

I that clear?

-Steve

Ah…  I see what you're asking.

Generally speaking, search engines don't particularly like squeeze pages because they lack content and don't link to content, but also because people will hit the back button once they see there isn't anything other than signing up or leaving.

The squeeze page is more about using a value proposition to make people take action (sign-up) rather than to inform/educate/share.  For this primary reason, search engines don't usually get enough information from the page to give it a high ranking authority status for the keywords it might be optimized for.

Now that's not to say you can't get a squeeze page to rank in the search engine…  I've done it a number of times.  It's just that someone else's mid- quality content site will probably out-rank the best squeeze page any day.  Again… generally speaking.  🙂

To directly answer your question, the reason John's homepage popped up in the results is because there are numerous pieces of content that are "Oszajca" related, lending relevance to each other via links and therefore boosting the site's overall ranking for the word "Oszajca".

It's harder to rank highly for a single page than it is for a series of related pages.  Make sense?

Mark said:

What would you think about doing something like on dailyworth.com.  Type in the URL and it redirects to dailyworth.com/subscribe (the squeeze page) UNTIL you've opted in.  Once you have opted in you never see it again on subsequent visits.

Hi Mark,

This sounds like they are running some type of Php or javascript to track a browser's cookie files or session info to see if they had visited the confirmation page.  You can do something like this, but let's say for instance that your sign up person clears their cookies in the browser, then they will have to see that default "subscribe" page again, even though they have already signed up.  This would be my biggest concern because once people sign up to your list the last thing you want to do is inconvenience them or piss them off.

The easy answer to this is use a solitary squeeze page for cold traffic and then share a content site with them after they sign up.  In fact your existing content serves as great relationship building tools and when you sequence which content you expose them to via the autoresponder, you can have a predictable and scalable sales funnel that behaves the same way everytime.

The only variable will be how your visitors behave once they see the content and you have a certain amount of control over that through tracking and testing.

🙂