Affiliate Web Marketing

Here’s a great post from Binh about the importance of Quality Score and how you can reduce the cost per click of each of your keywords. Take notes if you have too. This is important stuff!

Following my last post, the key to getting cheaper traffic, traffic at discounted prices, is to maximise your quality score with Google. In this post, I will explain how you can do just that.

So what’s this whole quality score thing all about anyway?

If we go back to a few years ago, the quality score was determined mainly by the click through rate (CTR) of your ad. That is, out of 100 times your ad is displayed, how many times does your ad get clicked. This determines your CTR, and hence affects your quality score. The logic behind this was that, if your ad is good, you will get a high CTR, and Google and its shareholders will make more money.

However, advertisers were abusing this system by bidding on irrelevant keywords that had a lot of searches and attention keywords such as Britney Spears or porn related keywords for example. When someone who was searching for these terms see and click on the ads, they were taken to a completely irrelevant page that wasn’t anything related to the keyword they had search for. This upset a lot of the Google users, and the use of the sponsored listings decreased.

Because of this, Google introduced a new algorithm that forced advertisers to be more ethical with their approach. This way, Google users will be more happy with the ads that are displayed (as they will be more relevant), and this can encourage users to use the sponsored listings. This, in turn, creates more revenue for Google and their shareholders, which makes everyone happy.

Ok. So then how do you get a high quality score?

Google looks for 2 specific things in particular when working out your quality score. They are:

- Transparency and
- Relevancy

Transparency

Basically, if you are a real and ethical business, you should have nothing to hide. If you hide any information about your business, it raises a red flag to Google’s eyes, as this advertiser can be using their network to build scams and unethical businesses. So to show Google that you have a genuine, ethical business, and to improve your quality score, do the following:

- Make sure you don’t register your domain name with a private registration
- Make sure you include your contact details on your website (this could be a link to another internal page with a way for users to contact you; it doesn’t have to be directly on the landing page)
- Make sure you have a link to your terms and conditions
- Make sure you have a link to your policies
- Make sure you have a link to information about you or your business

Doing the above will help you to achieve a higher quality score.

Relevancy

When a user searches for Nike shoes, Google wants to make sure that the ad and landing page they land on is about Nike shoes. In order to increase your relevancy, do the following:

- Put your keywords in your ad. Your ad is made up of a title, 2 lines of sentence and your display URL. If you can have you keywords in as many of these areas as possible, you will get a high quality score for your ad, as it is related to the keyword that you are bidding on.
- Put your keywords in your landing page. In particular:
- Put your keywords in the title of your page,
- Put your keywords in the heading tags of your landing page (if you don’t understand what heading tags are, ask your webmaster)
- Put your keywords in the content of your page. The closer to the top you can put your keywords, the better
- When you use your keywords in your landing page, style it with bold, italics, underline etc.
- Name your images appropriately (e.g. if it is a picture of a scarfe, name it scarfe.jpg, or scarfe.gif etc.)
- Put appropriate alt description tags to your images (if you don’t understand what these are, as your webmaster)
- If possible, include the keyword in your domain name. When I find a really profitable keyword, I sometimes go and buy a domain name just for this keyword.

A few more tips to improve your quality score:
- Link to another relevant, non commercial site for your keyword. Wikipedia is great for this. For example, if you are selling web design services, make the term “Web Design” a link to the wikipedia site that explains what web design is. In Google’s eyes, a normal website should have links to other relevant websites, and since Wikipedia already has a lot of credibility with Google, linking to them is a great strategy for improving your quality score.
- Make sure your website loads quickly. The faster it loads, the better. Google will penalise you for having a slow loading landing page because they don’t want to make their users have to go through the wait.
- Include a site map on your site – this could be a HTML site map on your site, or it can be an xml site map which you use to submit to Google in the Google Webmasters area. To create an XML site map, go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. It is free and it is easy. Just enter your URL and press the “Start button”.

The golden rule is to make your landing page look and act like a normal legitimate website/business, then Google will reward you with a higher quality score and a lower cost per click. Don’t try to trick them with tricks, as they will find out and will find solutions and ways to penalise the unethical advertisers. If you want a long term, sustainable income with PPC, follow their rules, and I guarantee you will last a lot longer in the market place than your competitors who are using short-term black hat (illegal) methods.

Before I finish off, I just want to give you a tip about your landing page. Make your landing page separate from your home page. Your landing page should be very specific to the keyword that you bid on. If Google users are searching for a type of Nike shoe, and they are taken directly to your home page that sells all types of shoes, they will often leave your page and look at a different competitor site. You need to make it as easy as possible for the searchers to find what they are looking for with minimum effort possible i.e. minimum clicks to take them to that information. The more specific and targeted your landing page is, the higher your conversion rate will be – the more money into your pockets

There are a couple of don’t do’s that you must avoid in Google Adwords, which I will explain in a new post tomorrow. For now, feel free to comment or ask any questions and I will try to answer them as soon as I can.

Regards,

Binh Down Under

www.payperclickecademy.net