No one needs to remind you of the time and energy that went into getting a visitor to your website, and sometimes your efforts pay off. Your email was read. Your ad worked. You were among the top search results.

If all went according to plan, your visitor has arrived. Regardless of how that visitor found you, whether by search, advertisement or email, the question is the same:

Now what?

How do you get your visitor to take action, whether by making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter or filling out a form? The specific action is irrelevant. Whatever the next step is, you want your visitor to take it.

The landing page is there to make that next step as painless and easy as possible. Make your landing page do its job by following a few simple guidelines.

1. Keep it clear. Make sure that your visitor immediately understands the action that you want him to take. The language you used to induce this fateful visit should match the language that appears on your landing page, so that each visitor understands why he reached this destination. If your landing page incorporates a single call to action, do not clutter the page with distractions. An ambiguous call to action is really a call to take no action at all.
2. Keep it short. Now is not the time to demonstrate your creative flair. People tend to skim when reading on the web. Keep your paragraphs short, your sentences simple and pay particular attention to beginnings and ends, the parts of paragraphs that people notice.
3. Keep it simple. Rein in your designers. Complicated layouts serve only to distract your potential customers from the task at hand. Site controls should be as simple as possible and, above all, there should be nothing for your visitors to figure out. People will not tolerate any learning curve. If necessary, choose simplicity over artistry. Craigslist, for example, is no beauty, but every user knows just what to do from the moment the page appears.
4. Keep out of the way. You may be tempted to take advantage of this visit by collecting information about your visitor. Resist. Even if the entire point of the visit is to gather information, stay away from forms that incorporate every field that comes to mind. Visitors will abandon your page as soon as a visit becomes a burden. This same advice holds true for anything that takes away a visitor’s control of the browser, including pop-ups, pop-unders and, as a general rule, music that automatically assaults your potential customers.
5. Keep it professional. A landing page should inspire trust. Grammatical errors and typos undermine that trust. All copy should be checked more than once for errors. Landing pages should be tested in all the major browsers, Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer, to make sure that they display correctly, work properly and load quickly.