I’ve had comments that people would like to see tips on search engine marketing, online marketing, and conversion. Well, ask and ye shall receive.

Today’s tip is on ad and landing page quality for pay-per-click.

Most people think setting up a campaign is picking keywords, and setting a maximum cost per click. And that after ‘buying these keywords’, their ads will show and traffic will come. Nothing could be farther from the truth today. With a large number of ads competing for the same keywords, the search engines have engineered some very clever algorithms (and even human involvement) to show only the most relevant ads, and ones that have the most relevant landing pages.

This is done to promote click thru and a better user experience for the searcher. Remember, it’s called pay-per-click, so they don’t get paid if people don’t click on your ad because it doesn’t seem relevant. With that said, choosing hundreds of keywords, including the names of your competitors isn’t going to work very well. You will find the bids for keywords that they don’t deem relevant, will start at $6.00 per click on Google. So unless you have set your bid at $6.00, you (and others) won’t even see your ad. On the other hand, you have to be a masochist to want to pay $6.00 a click for a keyword that is only mildly relevant. It is a very good deterrent to blindly buying keywords.

The quick answer to this is to try to match your keyword to your ad, and your ad to the landing page. So if you’re selling Whistler condos, your best bet would be matching keywords like ‘whistler real estate’ to an ad that says ‘Whistler Condos For Sale’, and then matched with a non-flash landing page, offering condos that are in Whistler, and mention the town site etc. If you’re using Google, this will increase your Google Adwords Quality Score, and lower your cost per click, show the ad more often and increase your click thru.

Yahoo has a similar algorithm, but that use different criteria to determine quality. Be warned that they are different from Google, and what works on Yahoo (eg dynamic keyword insertion) doesn’t work well on Google for quality scores, which will affect impressions.