As many of our readers here have no doubt seen, SEOmoz was the first participant in Roberta Rosenberg's Landing Page Makeover Clinic. Scott's been hard at work today generating a landing page that helps to meet these criteria and with a bit of luck, we can use Roberta's assistance to ramp up premium membership. Since this is SEOmoz and we pride ourselves on transparency, I'll start with a few stats from Indextools to help illustrate the issue:

The above stats show stats from <undisclosed time period> with a conversion rate of ~0.14%... fairly pathetic

Extrapolating from these numbers, we can see that increasing SEOmoz's conversion rate even a fraction of a percent would yield an incredible increase in potential income for the company - far greater, in fact, than a huge boost in rankings at the engines. If Google sent SEOmoz 10,000 extra visitors per day, it wouldn't be nearly as valuable as increasing our current conversion rate by 1/2 of 1 percent.

And that point, brings me to the purpose of this post...

While the practice of organic search engine optimization and Internet marketing in general is to attract visitors who are likely to convert (interested in our subject, searching on our topic, etc.), the conversion process is one that occasionally is overlooked by even the best in the industry. At SEOmoz, I'm definitely ready to admit that this has been a weak point for us on both our own sites and in client projects in the past.

There's some great places you can go to learn about landing page optimization in the blogosphere:

• Jon Mendez's Optimize & Prophesize
• The Eisenbergs' Grok dot com
• The MindValleyLabs Blog
• Copyblogger's Roberta Rosenberg

Landing page optimization is fundamentally different than SEO, though, which you can easily discover from reading through various posts discussing the comparisons of techniques in particular industries and niches. What works in one industry won't work in another and what works for visitors who clicked a paid search ad won't necessarily convert as well for a visitor who clicked on an organic result. The only real rule is that there are no real rules - the practice requires testing, creativity and ruthless refinement using analytics.

It's a fascinating subject and one I hope to explore more here at SEOmoz. We'll obviously be working on it for ourselves, and potentially testing a few client sites to boot.

One of the fundamental problems that I struggle against is the personal affront I take to most successful landing pages in our particular line of work. Let me share some horrifying examples:

• The SEO Elite Software download page
• The Buy the SEOBook page
• The Optilink Software sales page

The objectives at pages like these are simple:

1. Appeal to base emotions like fear, jealousy and avarice
2. Leverage hooks like "what the professional SEOs don't want you to know," because, naturally, if you're not ranking well, it's because of a conspiracy to prevent it and not out of ignorance or lack of effort
3. Mislead viewers into believing that the "secret" will make it "easy" to achieve all their goals
4. Motivate with hype and sound bites rather than educating and relying on an intelligent decision

This type of marketing copy is damn effective. Aaron Wall told me his conversion rate after switching to a page format like this has sent his sales skyrocketing to unbelievable proportions. Yes, this saddens me, but it's also inspiring - if they can do it, so can we, right?

Well, maybe. But we've got to be willing to sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity to get it done.

UPDATE: A couple of points of note - we promised a price raise on SEOmoz premium memberships today, but we're actually going to wait a week until Jane's brilliant, long-awaited premium article on social media marketing is released. At that time, the price will rise to $49/month & $399 for a one year membership. I'll try to make notice of this on the homepage and the premium page tomorrow.