Let’s talk about landing pages and quality scores.  If you’re not getting good or great scores on 80% of your keyword phrases then you have problems.

When has OK ever been good enough?  Good enough for some, but not us.

The Adwords game has increasingly become about SEO.

SEO?  I don’t want to waste my time with SEO - I want results now.

Guess what hot shot?  It doesn’t matter what you and I want.  What matters is what Google wants and what Google wants is relevance for THEIR customer.

I have to imagine that Google’s dream is that one day the quality of the paid ads exceeds the quality of it’s organic search listings.  Relevance brings people to Google.  Relevant ads make Google money.

I own a variety of software programs that will “cheat” the landing page issue.  And I don’t use them.  It’s short-sighted.  It won’t last.  These things never have and they never will.

Just do the job right the first time and all problems are solved - at least with Google.

So here’s your crash course in creating relevant pages - well, one more thing.  I don’t send PPC traffic to anything but a squeeze page.  That misinformation that Google doesn’t like squeeze pages is crap.  It’s also crap information to say you need a big website full of free content.

What you need is a page that’s well SEO’d.

Search Engine Optimization for Adwords

1.  Start building your sites with Wordpress.  I used to advice against sending traffic to blogs and I was wrong.  I didn’t know what I was doing - now I do.  You don’t send people to your home page.  You don’t send people to “posts”.  You can create pages and that’s where you send your traffic - to relevant pages.

This rule isn’t etched in stone but Wordpress does so many SEO things right that you can be an SEO idiot and still succeed.  Besides it saves time and I’ve been given “poor” ratings on static HTML sites that I turned into blogs that now have “great” ratings.  Google likes blogs, not just for SEO.

2.  Include exact keywords you want placement for in the page title.

If you’re running an ad for “affiliate black book” then that should be your page title.  Optimally, use 60-80 characters in your page title.  But don’t spam words into it -

3.  Include keywords in the page name: ie, affiliate-black-book.html.  Or if using a blog, set your page names to be /%postname%/

4. Use H1, H2, and H3 tags for relevant titles on the page, which include your keywords and topic related phrases.

5.  Include primary keywords in headlines and subheadlines.

6.  Include topic related keywords in each paragraph (this should happen naturally).

7.  VITALLY IMPORTANT: When linking to other pages within your site, use keywords in the anchor text.

A few tips I picked up from Perry Belcher

- Use only numbers to name your images.

- Use images (or alternative words) for common spam filtered marketing terms like “free”, “guaranteed”, “special offer”, etc.

- Google Images might be more important than anyone knew - if you name an image “apples.gif” then Google serves that in Google Images.  The more people who look for apple images that click on your quality image, the more relevance you get.

- Link offsite to high PR authority sites like Wikipedia.com, .edu sites, or Dictionary.com that don’t offer anything to buy anyway.  This can add value to the visitor by defining jargon terms within your page, yet pose little threat to loss of sales.

Squeeze Pages Are OK - Really!

If your squeeze page or sales letter are getting Google Slapped it probably isn’t because they’re a squeeze page or a sales letter - it’s because they’re just BAD SEO.

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Tags: Adwords, seo, squeeze page

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 4:46 pm and is filed under Adwords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.