In the previous article I discussed how and why the recent changes to Googles Quality Score (QS) may have had an adverse impact on your Adwords campaigns. Google is now basing its QS at the domain level so even previously acceptable one page landing pages have been hit with higher cost-per-click and lower ranking. In this article I’ll discuss steps you can take to keep in the game and get those CPCs (Cost Per Clicks) back down again.

1. Create a Mini WebSite

Although simple one page landing pages with no outgoing links to the same domain can still be advertised, many people are finding that their bid prices are being set as ‘inactive for search’ due to Google ranking the overall domain with a low quality score. A home, contact, privacy policy, information, review, etc. pages linked together in the form of a full website is what Google is now looking for in most cases.

Add more content to the pages in the form of articles and place these on an Articles page in your site. Write at least 2 articles and submit them to as many high-profile directories as you can and then link these back to your site and vice-versa. This is a very good way to boost your QS as Incoming links are also a score-boosting factor.

2. Add a Blog

Google likes fresh content, and lots of it and Google indexes blogs very quickly. If you have a blog setup on your website, you can post to it with relevant content everyday if you want. That way Google will see your site as being new and full of content. You can get a free blog at Blogger.com.

Get your blog set up and start posting content to it. Any material you have such as, newsletter material, articles…really anything related to your niche that you can post on your blog can be added.

If your site is brand new, then adding a blog will definitely raise your sites standing and quality score. Be sure to link your blog to your website and vice versa and place any articles you write in both places.

3. Set-up A Site Map

You can do it using Googles Site Map Tool at; http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

Google do a complete run through of your site and alert you to any other problems that it may find.

4. Add Links from your Landing Pages back to the your Website.

I would normally not recommend adding any links from your landing pages because you dont want people being distracted and clicking away from the page. However a subtle link back to the website home page contained in the landing page footer or some other unobtrusive place should do no harm and will allow the web crawlers to link the landing pages back to a full website.

5. Include More Content

Write a a targeted 200-300 word content article (it could be product review) based on your landing pages theme and add it to the landing page.

Conclusion

Whilst it may require more effort it is now more important than ever to ensure that not only are your Ads, keywords and landing pages highly relevant but that your domain is as well. Remember that the most relevant and targeted sites will be rewarded with a higher quality score and the higher your score the better. The price you pay per click will go down and your ad placement position will go up! If you follow the steps above you can stay in the Adwords game and keep playing to win.

Good Luck!

PS Are you pulling your hair out trying to master Adwords? I review the TOP Guides AND you can GRAB your FREE e-book ‘How To Find Hot Markets & Keywords’ here! - http://www.moneyreality.co.uk. David Brown is a successful affiliate marketer who has learnt the hard way that THE key to being a success is perseverance.

AffiliateMoneyTree 2006

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If you’re looking for an easy and low risk way to increase your landing page conversion rates, then use the conversion rate optimization strategies outlined in this online guide.

About Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization is the continual process of making your Web Site and landing pages generate better results from your visitor traffic. For example, more leads, opt-ins, and more sales. Conversion Rate Optimization is also the fastest and easiest strategy to increase your sales without spending more money on increasing your traffic. In fact, the most successful companies test everything.

For example, GoToMyPC.com increased their conversion rates by 400% by testing the following;

• Headlines
• Call to Action
• Copy
• Images
• Graphics
• Button Look
• Button Text
• Button Location
• No Links
• Press Quotes
• Testimonials
• Pricing
• Flow Through Process
• And more

Optimizing Your Landing Pages ‘Conversion Funnel’

If you review your web site statistics (called ‘log files’) you’ll notice the following 4 things are happening on your landing pages…

1. The largest percentage of your visitors are bailing within 0-8 seconds after briefly viewing your landing page.
2. The second largest percentage of visitors bail when they decide your landing page does not prove compelling.
3. A small percentage of visitors attempt to convert (buy or use a contact form to become a lead) but fail. Many of these people will call.
4. A small percentage of visitors convert.

Conversion Rate Optimization is the process of optimizing your landing pages to minimize your ‘bail out rate’ and maximize your ‘conversion rate’ (CR).

The Top 6 Landing Page Components To Optimize for Maximizing Your Conversions

The following are the Top 6 conversion components that should be tested and improved to boost your conversion rates…

1. Headline - Since your headline is the first line that your visitors will read, the headline of your web page offers the biggest opportunity (about 80% of the opportunity) for improvements in conversion rate. Use headlines that clearly state the biggest benefit(s) that your product offers.
2. Offer - Since your offer is the ‘call to action’ that asks your visitors to act (purchase, sign up, opt-in), your offer accounts for the second the biggest opportunity for improvements in conversion rate.
3. Lead - The ‘lead’ or first paragraph is the third biggest opportunity for improvements in your conversion rate. Leads must be written with strong benefits that capture your visitors attention and make them want to read more.
4. Benefits - The ‘benefit bullets’ (bullet-point format) are the forth biggest opportunity for improvements in conversion rate. List your benefits in the order of your products ‘value hierarchy’ to your target market. In other words, state your products strongest benefit first, and its weakest benefit last.
5. Images - The images you use have a big impact on your conversion rates. The best practice is to use images that clearly portray the biggest benefit your product offers your customer (rather than generic ‘feel good’ stuff like unknown logos and clip art). Studies show that product images work best when placed to the left of your product description (or lead paragraph) since it makes it easier to read your copy from left to right. Plus, people like to reads ‘captions’ under your images almost as much as they read your headlines. So, add powerful captions and make your images clickable to the order/sign up page.
6. ‘Look & Feel’ - According to a recent study by Stanford University, 46% of Web sales are lost on web sites that lack the critical elements that build value and trust with website visitors. The number one reason the people indicated why they would’nt buy from a web site was because it had an unprofessional ‘look and feel’ that lacked credibility and did not ‘feel’ trustworthy. Having a professional look, and trust building tools (such as VeriSign and BBBOnline certifications) help convert significantly more of your web sites qualified visitors into new customers.

Other Important Conversion Elements to test:

• Buttons - Button text, color, look, etc.
• Pricing
• Formatting and placement of page elements, images and copy
• Navigation links versus no navigation links
• Press Quotes
• Testimonials

Other Conversion Best Practices and Tips:

• Reduce your ‘bail out rate’ by optimizing your web pages to download within 5 seconds on a 56k modem - Test your pages on Andy King’s ‘Web Page Analyzer’ at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/
• Add a 1-800 Number and a Call to Action above the fold (top of the page)
• Add a Logo and a powerful ‘Value Proposition’ to the top left
• Instead of letting visitors click off your landing page, put all your information on one page (This tactic alone increased the conversions of a landing page by 55%)
• Use colors that fit your target customers personality

Conclusion:

When you use ‘Conversion Rate Optimization’ to test and improve your web pages and landing pages you can double your sales (possibly even quadruple) when you add up all the performance improvements. Of course, it takes time and work but its well worth the effort.

If you’re truly serious about maximizing your results, continuously test, track and improve the important elements of your web site, landing pages (and your marketing materials).

Matt Hockin is President of Interactive Marketing, Inc., an Internet marketing company specializing in helping businesses increase sales by maximizing website search engine visibility and website conversions through the process of web site optimization http://www.interactivemarketinginc.com

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Matt Levenhagen did a great post on his blog recently that discussed the whole Landing Page and Quality Score issue. Matt is a great guy and very generous in his Adwords and Internet marketing knowledge to many people, newbies included. I have witnessed his generousity on several forums, most recently on the Keywords Analyser forum.

On his blog, Matt touched on a great point and it got me thinking; Fear sells, and the latest Google Quality Score update in July of this year has got people running scared. The recent flurry of eBook releases pertaining to have ‘the solution‘ to the recent changes by Google is testament to this.

However, Matt’s Adwords campaigns haven’t been impacted much at all by the so-called Google Slap. The main reasons Matt believes is that the methods detailed in his Campaign Blasts product really do work!

Matt’s lists the Top 3 reasons why he wasn’t affected by the latest Landing Page and Quality Score update as being;

1. Merchant Quality - A merchants website must be well laid out with good sales copy.
2. Diversify - It is recommended to have a large portfolio of merchants and products/services to promote.
3. Relevant Results for Searchers - Ensuring your ads and ad groups direct searchers to the relevant products/services that they are searching for. Sounds simple, but you would be surprised at how many people do not do this.

Matt has written an entire guide regarding this update that is now included with the Campaign Blasts Package.

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Landing pages are the norm in PPC campaigns - but you should also consider using them for your Link Building SEO (Search Engine Optimization) campaigns. After all, when seeking links to their sites, some webmasters make the mistake of thinking that everything has to point to their index page, or else that they need to spread a lot of links around a lot of different product pages. In such instances, these webmasters are overlooking the clear efficiencies of Landing Pages for their link building programs.

What Are ‘Landing Pages’?

Landing Pages are nothing more complicated than information rich pages. Each page can be as niche specific, or general, as required. And although it is common for Landing Pages to be set up as internal pages, sometimes it is simply more efficient to turn a site index page into a single landing page.

Do not think of landing pages as merely a short piece of text to rank with, Landing Pages are essentially the marriage of links and content into a truly fruitful working relationship.

How To Set Up Landing Pages

It is often a good idea to optimise for multiple keyphrases or topic areas - do so by providing a keyword-rich heading, accompanied by a few sentences of text relating to that keyword/keyphrase, and then accompany this with a keyworded link to your deeper content.

Do this for multiple variations of your most important keywords, and take into account issues such as keyword order (first keyword in a keyphrase/searchterm is determinative in Google, for example), and also plural and singular forms (for example, ‘insurances‘ is far less competitive than the singular form ‘insurance’.

Of course, also bear in mind geo-targeting and spelling errors, where you feel you can cleanly get away with them. However, remember that Landing Pages are essentially for humans as well as spiders, so the pages must look useful to both.

The Secret Of Landing Pages

Really, the principle of the Landing Page for link building purposes, is no different for general on-page SEO. The key point is examining what information you are providing, and providing it on a very selective basis. There is a very subtle difference in applying Landing Pages, than in general content SEO work because of the extremely selective and targeted manner in which Landing Pages are built.

And here is the secret of Landing Pages - when you set up your keyword anchor text to your Landing Pages, not only will you rank for the keywords in your anchor text, but your anchor text will also combine with your keyworded headings and keyworded on-page links to produce a wide range of secondary search terms you can rank much more easily for, yet still remain targeted and focused on your chosen subject area.

This is why Landing Pages have become a generally useful as part of Link Building SEO - because of the extremely controlled way that information can be delivered and targeted.

Are Landing Pages Dodgy?

As before, Landing Pages are nothing more than information-rich pages. They suit search engines by providing rich content, and they help human users, by providing clearly focussed pages to find information they need, and help direct them to specialist internal pages for further information as required. And it suits the webmaster, because it allows the traffic to be targeted in a much more precise manner.

Can I See An Example Of A Landing Page?

I won’t provide any commercial examples of a Landing Page, as that would be a little unfair in this environment. However, Roy Troxel at the Webserver Times recently complained that his most popular page was his privacy policy page. If you take a look at it, he has inadvertently produced a landing page, based on the keywords in the headings covered in the privacy policy.

Can I Get Legitimate Links To Landing Pages?

Absolutely, because Landing Pages provide rich information for humans, as well as search engine spiders, then you can easily have them listed at Directories that allow multiple pages to be listed from the same site, such as DMOZ, Sevenseek, and WowDirectory. Also, directories such as MSN bcentral, Jayde, and Webatlas also allow for multiple links to internal pages to accompany your entry.

Brian Turner is the director of Britecorp’s search engine strategy, and also runs free one-to-one workshops at SEO Lab and the Platinax SEO forums.

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You’ve researched your keywords, written great ads, set your budgets and bids, and have embarked on what promises to be a really butt-kicking PPC campaign. But wait, you’re not seeing the conversion numbers you expected. So you go into crisis mode, you check the conversion code, you test the campaign by actually clicking on your own sponsored search (or PPC) ad; and your results show that everything is right and perfectly implemented. So what is the problem?

Building your Landing Page

Before you throw more of your budget at the search engines, or spend needless time looking at keywords and what users are searching for, take a look at your landing page.

• Is it telling users what they need to know?
• Is it friendly and good looking?
• Or do you arrive at a page loaded with information in a font or format that is hard on the eye?
• Are you able to immediately see the relevance of the page to the information you searched for, or do you have to wade through screens worth of waffle with no way out, and no other navigation options?
• Can you request information from the site owner on this page or do you have to go elsewhere to do that?

These are serious concerns and my advice to you is;

When building landing pages for your PPC campaigns the best thing you can do is KISS! (Keep It Seriously Simple).

Cost Per Click Value

I firmly believe that if you have a PPC campaign showcasing various services your company offers; that you should have a landing page built specifically for each service. Don’t send users to a generic page that tells them what ‘Chantelle’s Holidays’ is all about, if they have searched for ‘things to see in cape town’. If you are going to use this as a keyword, get proper value from the cost of the click by giving the user the information they are looking for. The more relevant and fresh you make this page, the higher your chances of making that conversion or sale.

I recently worked on a campaign (in my capacity as PPC Campaign Manager for Quirk eMarketing) that hadn’t shown the results we’d expected over a period of time. By simply adding a few textlinks to the existing page, we started to see a considerable increase in the conversion rate. Another great idea is to use a very simple technology called a navigation panel.

Making Browsing Better

In fact, visit any good website that provides information and you’re likely to be greeted by options that allow you to navigate to other pages on the site - and other options that allow you to navigate the page you’re on. This is especially important if the information on the page extends below the fold. Instead of asking browsers to scroll down, you are giving them the ability to quickly find the information they are looking for; making the entire browsing experience easier and more efficient.

Once again, ‘keep it simple’. Give users what they are looking for in a way that is easy for them to access. Whether it’s a site aimed at business people or holiday makers, or the youth, or the general public - make visiting your pages a memorable experience. If people know they can get relevant information quickly by visiting you, not only will they keep coming back to your site, there will also be willingness and a certain trust when it comes to doing business with you.

Success Made Simple

Focus on one aspect of the business and build a PPC campaign around that one area. Start Small! Tweak that campaign until it is running the way you want it, and only then shift your focus to another area - slowly building pages and campaigns for each aspect of your business as you go. These simple baby-steps will ensure that you don’t waste any of your precious budget, and that each part of the campaign goes smoothly and operates at its peak; optimising your business performance. If all else fails, get an expert opinion!

Quirk eMarketing have many successful PPC campaigns under their belt. Submitting to the paid search engines is a process not an event. It is a chess game, and you need to manage every detail. ‘A true professional will not cost you money; they will make you money.’

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As competition within the online affiliate sales arena rises to a fierce boil, affiliate sellers expecting any degree of success must first find effective methods to set themselves apart from the crowd.

An uninitiated affiliate may expect to make sales simply by placing a referral link on his website, or by distributing the link in an email. On the other hand, a seasoned affiliate seller knows that a unique marketing twist of one sort or another must be built into the campaign for a satisfying profit to be realized.

One tested and proven method is to develop a unique landing webpage for each and every affiliate campaign engaged.

A Landing Page is nothing more than a proprietary webpage owned by the affiliate seller, hosted on his website, and and located at a URL within that domain. A well developed landing page will not only contain the actual affiliate referral link, but will also serve as an introduction to the product or service being offered, and will warm the customer prior to directing her to the main sales page.

Here we present three types of affiliate landing pages that have been proven effective in promoting a broad range of affiliate products and services.

However, the reader should note that no particular order of effectivenes is presented here. Determining the best type of landing page for a particular affiliate campaign will be a matter of careful consideration and diligent testing.

Landing Page No. 1

The Product Review

This style of page takes the form of a factual and objective report, and should be completely free of any wording that attempts to sell. Direct experience with the product is a must, as the writer will be providing her or his own first hand observations regarding the benefits and problems that arise while actually putting the product or service to use.

Typically, a single product is reviewed for the sake of simplicity. Yet some successful landing pages do feature reviews of multiple products within a given category. In this case, each individual product should be rated by means of an easy to understand system, ie. one to five “stars.”

For the sake of credibility, the product review must reveal both positive and negative product attributes. Still, the positive factors should firmly overshadow the negative in a realistic and honest sense. If not, look for a different affiliate product to promote.

Landing Page No. 2

The Pre-Sell

This tactic has also been referred to as the “soft sell“. The content here can borrow some of the effects of the product review method, but should be more directed overall toward defining a problem and offering the affiliate product or service as a solution.

It is advisable to carefully examine the main seller’s page to discover and capitalize on overlooked product benefits or hooks. It is also acceptable to use highlighted or bolded words and phrases to a degree, providing they will enhance the reader’s understanding.

A strong headline may be used, and bulleted lists may also be inserted to clearly illustrate product features and benefits. But keep in mind this is a “soft sell” page. The purpose is only to warm the reader. There should be no hard sell or call to action other than asking her to “Click This Link to Learn More.”

Landing Page No. 3

The Forced Opt-In

This type of page typically consists of nothing more than a strong headline, a problem reinforcement, an offer to solve the problem, and an autoresponder opt-in box. The prospect can be immediately redirected to the main salespage after she signs up.

Experienced affiliate marketers have varying opinions as to the effectiveness of this landing page, especially when used behind a paid advertising campaign. There is some conjecture that too many prospects are lost when they fail to opt-in.

Another viewpoint is that this tactic produces a high quality list of action-taking propects with a proven degree of interest. Given these two viewpoints, it may be wise to perform a split testing action, using the forced opt-in page and at least one other landing page configuration.

Regardless of either view, the forced opt-in tactic will enable the affiliate to capture a unique and highly targeted mailing list, a valuable asset in and of itself. No Hype - No Bull - No Pie In The Sky!

Dan B. Cauthron tells it like it really is, and shares 30+ years of direct marketing wisdom. Entrance to his member’s only website will never cost you a penny: http://www.DanBCauthron.Com