How Do you get a Sales Page to rank

[SEO Montreal]

Most SEO seems focused on getting the homepage ranking, yet it's really the sales page that does the job (hence landing pages for ppc...). My question is how would you go about garnering links to a sales page, other than by getting paid links?

For example, if you google seo book, aaron wall's sales page comes up indented after his homepage. In addition, his tools page comes up following that. How can you go about obtaining similar results (without spamming)
Thanks for the info!

[Kostis Panayotakis]

Hi
In any optimization plan the Customer experience should be taken into account.
The sales funnel stages should be somehow accommodated.

The sales pages does the job only if the customer is convinced about the product features, informed about payment & delivery options etc.

You can produce product or solution related material on other internal pages, meaningfully pointing to that ‘sales page’. These pages should target specific keywords relevant to the product marketed. Some keyword analysis could be needed.

K

[Robert_Charlton]

Most SEO seems focused on getting the homepage ranking, yet it's really the sales page that does the job (hence landing pages for ppc...).

SEO Montreal - You're starting from an incorrect assumption. To oversimplify, the unit of optimization is a page, not a site, and specifically not just the homepage... and good SEO should target and optimize pages that you want to be found.

Good SEO involves...
- choosing your search targets carefully...
- structuring your site to take into account user experience, search engine spidering, PageRank distribution, and likely inbound linking...
- creating content worthy of inbound linking...
- differentiating your product content from other sites to distinguish your pages from other such pages on the web...
- and promoting the site and pages so others will link to them.

Ideally, a good SEO will work to make sure your sales pages are ranking. Site architecture plays a big part in SEO work.

[AussieWebmaster]

Exactly... you need as many inbound links to an internal page as you do your home page.... more in many cases as it usually has a lower PR.

[SEO Montreal]

Kostis, I think you make a good point about providing the information a customer needs with the different pages so that they understand what they're getting. Besides price and benefits, what sort of information might be important to a customer that might contribute to getting them to convert? (I'm interested for services especially, but if you could share advice related to selling products I'm happy to learn about that too.)
That relates to your point Rob: how do you look at user experience? Is it enough to be easily navigable with a simple top bar of links and perhaps some bread crumb navigation? What else can you do? (Please bear with my newbiness.)

Aussie, I realize you need inbound links, but the question is really about how to attract them. A sales page doesn't tend to have good content but is really focused on copy to convert visitors...