Hi,
Marketing gurus/experts recommend squeeze/landing pages without a navigation bar and a link back to a home page to avoid distracting visitors and maximize conversions.
SEO experts recommend inter-linking pages/posts and having bread crumb, links back to home page and other pages to help users navigate easily and stay on the website as long as possible.
Then do I need to not allow search engines to crawl the LP, or add a canonical URL to landing pages? Can someone please help clarify the best practices to maximize both conversions and SEO?
Many thanks!
You can have your site optimized for SEO with all the internal linking required. And dedicated landing pages not indexed by robots for your paid traffic.
These two things do not go together that well.
Landing pages for paid traffic are optimized for direct response to convert the paid clicks. As you said yourself, you do not want to distract the prospects too much and the whole purpose of such a LP is to heat the user up and funnel them to the offer itself. So naturally, these LPs are missing a few key SEO elements... no interlinking (or very limited), no external link building, limited KW optimization etc...
But that doesn't mean that such LPs cannot be ranked at all, I actually ranked many of them without even trying that hard. You can still link to these LPs from other subpages, there can still be all the meta tags and careful KW placement to not interfere with the copy and you can also place a few internal links on these LPs, in spots where they are not that likely to get clicked, for example in the footer. Just don't expect these to rank that high and it shouldn't even be their purpose.
In my opinion, you should focus on SEOing the rest of the site, then try to direct part of the traffic to the actual sales pages (landing pages), if you manage to rank the LPs too, that's a bonus.
You can also do what jeremie suggested, keep these 2 things separate completely, but I don't think allowing the robots to index the LPs would hurt the overall SEO of the site.