The Home Page and the Landing Page are the same and not the same. It is like asking "To be or not to be. That is the question."
For many years, as I was going through my learning stages, I never knew the difference between a Home Page and a Landing Page. It can be confusing to many, because they could be one in the same, or they could be different pages.
Very simply, the Landing Page is the page that a viewer opens to, or lands on, when they click to your website from a particular location. Where as, the Home Page is the primary, or, first page of your website.
For example, let's assume that I am selling a book on my website titled "Book" and a viewer is reading an article about it on one of the article directories. He finds the title "Book" so intriguing that he can't resist clicking on the link which takes him directly to the page on my website entitled "Book". That page is my landing page for this particular item.
The importance of the Landing Page is to direct a viewer to a specific page, or, section of the website that pertains to the subject in which they are interested. This way you are taking the viewer to where you want them to go, as opposed to going to your Home Page and then having to find what they are looking for. Very often, before they have found what they want, they have lost interest or have become distracted by something else and you lost the customer.
Just to confuse things a little, a landing Page is not just one page. You can have as many Landing Pages, as you have pages on your website.
If you want to leave now, you can. However, it really isn't as confusing as it sounds. Your Landing Page is any page that you designate as such, for a specific topic or item. In other words, if each page of your website is a different topic or item that you want to bring specific attention to, you may designate that page as a Landing Page and have links directed specifically to those pages.
Your Home Page is also a Landing Page when someone is just looking for you website as a whole.
Now that we know what they do, what do they really do and are they worth the effort?
The first part of the answer is that they tell you where your viewers/customers are coming from and more specifically what their interest is. If you are selling Jewelry and a viewer/customer opens to your Home Page, you know that they are interested in your jewelry, but you really do not know, specifically, what they may be interested in buying.
However, if ten viewers open to your Landing Page for Ruby Jewelry and one viewer opens to the Amber Jewelry Landing Page, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that there is a lot more interest in Rubies than Amber. Therefore, you may consider expanding the Ruby department and reducing the Amber.
The answer to the second part of the question is a definite, yes, it is worth the effort. In fact, you may find that there are more people coming to your website through other than your Home Page.
In our case, we get a lot of activity coming to our website that we know comes from various article directories, which go to the specific Landing Page for that article. We also know which articles attracted more attention since we can count the number of landings.
This is only a brief overview of what Landing Pages can do. It is definitely worth pursuing.
