A landing page is a marketing site. When startups want to launch their products, they build marketing sites to help advertise. Modulz is a collection of HTML website sections that you can customize and piece together to build your marketing site.

I'm building a Web site.

What does a landing page have to do with the Web site? Is the landing page one of the pages at the site with the domain name of the site? Is the hosting the same as for the site? Does the landing page first exist before the site does, at the same time the site does, or only after the site does? Why isn't a landing page just one more page I could have at my site with the same domain name of my site? Does the landing page have links to the other pages of the site? In what sense is the landing page "marketing", keywords for search engines or search engine optimization (SEO) or something else?

I understand the Web site I'm building but not landing pages -- trying to learn. I might need a landing page.

So, if one reason someone might use my site is to learn about cooking, then maybe I will have a landing page intended just to attract (via search engines and keywords about cooking) users interested in cooking and from that landing page have a link to my site? In this case the landing page for cooking doesn't really tell the user much about cooking but just directs them to my site where they can learn more about cooking?

And if my site is also of interest to people interested in classical music, then I might have a landing page just for users with that interest?

Is that the idea?

If so, then such a landing page might have difficulty doing well in page rank?

The term 'landing page' is overloaded with two different meanings.

Meaning 1, the 'startup community' angle and the one being used for this product, is effectively a "one page website that sells a product". This can be a simple test (put a page up for a product that doesn't exist and see if it converts well), a page about a mobile app, or simply a page to promote a company with no released or conventional products yet. Often this'd be the only page on the site, and the root page at that domain.

Examples: anything from LaunchRock, Hipster's launch.

This Quora thread is good on the subject: http://www.quora.com/What-are-examples-startup-landing-pages

These landing pages often grow beyond their initial "onepager" design and become gateways into the product itself, blurring with the second interpretation of the term:

The 'marketing community' angle for landing pages is as you describe above. A page that's effectively targeted at an audience to convert them to a sale, sign-up, etc. This can be anything from a page that's keyword optimised for a specific feature-slice of a product, to a splash page that's used in certain campaigns, and the general point is to replace the "first contact" experience with the site with one that's more tailored to the specific user. (So that's why they're used in marketing, when the campaigns have some 'specific user' connotation.)

One example that straddles both uses would be http://www.codeschool.com/paths/ios - a landing page for iOS specific content.

Thanks, I needed that!

It's more of a very simple website that you are going to use before you have your actual website built, to gauge interest from potential users.

Usually a 'landing page' consists of a big title / catchphrase, a few points of information about your upcoming product, and a box where you can fill in your email address if you want to subscribe to the mailing list to have more info later. Kind of like what http://launchrock.co/, but less minimalistic I guess.

Thanks.