Adwords Landing Pages

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

Make $18,659 a Month with Affiliate Products using Google Adwords!

www.affiliatemoneytree.com

It has been revealed that Google is working on launching a new Quality Score Bot for Adwords. Shoemoney has just discussed the ramifications of the introduction of this new Quality Score Bot on his blog here. It seems that this new bot has been created in order to eliminate the Adsense Arbitragers abusing the Google network.

While it does seem these new changes at Adwords are purely targeted at the arbitragers, it should come as no shock that this will also affect Landing Pages for people linking directly to affiliate products also. Google believes linking directly like this lowers the the overall user experience and may eventually cause users to lose faith in its advertising network. So if you are running a landing page and directly linking with your affiliate link or running a site with nothing but Yahoo/Google ads on it, then the introduction of this new bot could directly affect your bottom line!

So, on to a solution. There seems only one way to overcome these new coming changes and that is… Cloak Your Links! If you have landing pages for products - do not link directly with the affiliate code provided to you! Make sure you have a redirect system in place which will mask or cloak your affiliate links.

For example, if you are were using Google Adwords to drive traffic to your website and on your website you have direct links to affiliate products such as;

http://productwebsite.com/product.php?a=1234&b=1234 (BAD)

While the following is an example of masking your affiliate link;

http://yourwebsite.com/link.php?go=1234 (GOOD)

Of course, with the bottom method you will have to disallow link.php in your robots.txt file for the bottom example to work. For a full explaination of cloaking and the methods involved, check out The Definitive Guide to Cloaking. Alternatively there is software applications that will do all this for you, such as the Affiliate Link Cloaker mentioned below.

Affiliate Link Cloaker is an easy to use and very sophisticated technology to actually encrypt your affiliate links, all you need to use
it is a PC and Web site.

No technical skills required!