Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Ancestor Landing Pages as Genealogical Cousin Bait

Ancestor landing pages on my genealogy blog

Cousin bait! 

Genealogy blogs are excellent cousin bait.

I use the ancestor landing pages that stretch along the top of my genealogy blog to summarize what I know about key ancestors in my family tree and my husband's family tree.

When a cousin searches online for a family name, my blog (and my landing pages) will show up in the results.

Over the years, as I add to these landing pages, I've also attracted more views and connected with more cousins.

Posting photos and other images makes these pages inviting and easy to read.

This table shows the number of views for each landing page, as of this morning.



Most Popular: McClure Landing Page

McClure/Donegal is by far the most popular landing page. My husband's mother was a McClure, descended from one of the branches traced in the well-researched book Following the McClures--Donegal to Botetourt, which follows the McClure family across the Atlantic Ocean and through Philadelphia, Virginia, and beyond.

When I blog about an ancestor or family, I put a link on the corresponding ancestor landing page. That keeps the landing pages current.

Welcome, cousins! Hope your next online search lands you on my genealogy blog.
--
Thanks to Amy Johnson Crow for this week's #52Ancestors theme of "land."

5 comments:

  1. I love your landing pages Marian, would love to do something like this someday.

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  2. What a great idea! I may have to try something like this. Thanks for sharing it.

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  3. Thank you for sharing this idea and the page views. It's very enlightening and something I'm now considering for my own blog.

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  4. Sounds quite worthwhile to set up. Maybe next month, I can tackle this.

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  5. Ladies, this was originally the idea of Carolyn Pointer, who featured landing pages on her blog in 2012: http://www.blogginggenealogy.com/blog/blogging-genealogy-how-to-get-visitors-to-read-more

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