With the first method, you will find that google may intially give you a decent ‘inital’ quality score value but you’ll find after a day or so (in some cases less depending on volume), that you’ve been slapped – a google penalty which penalises non-relevant ads with high CPCs. The AdWords system automatically finds affiliate links in destination urls as non-relevant and will therefore always slap you for it (you’ll end up paying $5 per click or something crazy like that). There is a guide available to help you fight off the google slap but my honest advice is to avoid this direct linking method at all costs. Besides, you can have more control over your own landing pages which will ultimately help you split test for better conversions.

To use your own landing pages, direct traffic to them and receive a much higher quality score when promoting affiliate products, read this post to see a live example of how I did it with a clickbank product.

When you’ve finished reading that, you might then want to read about how get a 10/10 AdWords Quality score.

Quality scores and quality content go hand in hand. To give you an example, here’s the ins and outs of one of my own AdWords campaigns and landing page combinations which went from an OK quality score of 7/10 to a great quality score of 10/10 simply by writing better, well researched content specifically related to the keyword, ad group and ad text I was using.

I have two pages targeting the keywords xbox red ring of death [one] and [two]. Now I have used my ‘about page’ in this particular case as an excuse to write good, related content. The target keyword in both of these cases is ‘how to fix the red ring of death’ using exact matching keywords.

Now on page one, I have really written the content around this phrase whilst in page two, I have divested slightly. The difference is that page one receives a quality score of 10/10 whilst page 2 only scores 8/10.

Project: Fixing the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death

So, how did I do it and what is actually different about the content?

Well, first of all I have to be honest and say I didn’t write the content myself but took advice from a great professional content writer whose quality of work constantly excels all expectations and who charges a more than fair price for the priviledge. Actually, at the moment, he’s running a limited time special offer deal so if you want to increase your landing page quality but just don’t have the time (like me!), then make sure you give this a look ASAP.

Ok, so back to the point at hand, how exactly did we do it? Well, as with any content you should be writing it for the end user, not the search engine spiders or PPC bots etc. This means you need to create a structurally and intellectually sound piece of writing using the core target keywords (‘how to fix the red ring of death’) and base the article around it. This doesn’t mean spam the heck out of the article by frequently referring to the keyword, but by perhaps including the keyword and variations of it in every other paragraph.

It’s also important to create section titles using html header tags with the target phrase (or a slight variation of it) in the article too. This adds structure. For example, in our case you’ll see that the main page title on the how to fix an xbox red ring of death page has variations of the target keyword in it.

To tie that into AdWords and PPC, I am running one Text Ad in an AdCampaign titled ‘Xbox Red Ring of Death Fix’ and in an AdGroup with only one keyword in it ‘how to fix red ring of death’:
100% Proven Xbox 360 Fix
Finally! Red Ring Fix That Takes
Just 30 Mins And Works Every Time
www.affiliatemusketeer.com/xbox360

My landing page title on the 10/10 quality score page is “How To Fix The Red Ring of Death on the XBOX 360″ whilst on the 8/10 score page it is “Why Am I Helping You Fix The Red Ring of Death on the XBOX 360?”.

You see how one is more targeted and specific? This is also a major contributing factor as to why one page outperforms another (at least in terms of AdWords Quality Score).

Summarise How To Increase Quality Score via Well Written Landing Pages:

• Write well targeted content (or get someone like Rob to do it for you!)
• Make sure you create very tightly targeted AdWords Campaigns, AdGroups and Ads with as tightly groups target keywords as possible
• Make sure you make use of the landing page title tag and keep it very closely linked to your target kewywords and AdWords factors (Campaign/AdGroup/TextAd)
• Structure your content well by using header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc) to groups paragraphs into ‘mini chapters’. You should use h1 only once on your page – at the very top is best, and then h2, h3, h4 etc for decreasingly important headers – but still a variant of the main page theme.

If you’d like more examples of some of my high quality score adwords landing pages then please feel free to drop me an email or post a comment on the blog.