The elements of a landing page (LP) help reenergize and improve a landing page’s performance.

1. Ad-LP relevance

I discussed this in my last blog under “continuity.” How relevant is your ad’s messaging to your Landing Page? When you have different keywords with lots of ads running, but direct traffic to just a few landing pages, then the relevance to your ad and LP isn’t very good. For example, someone who clicks on a mobile accessories ad is directed to a generic mobile phone page, which is not closely related to the ad. The Ad-LP relevance needs to be more focused and specific.

2. Design

How does your landing page look? When a visitor clicks on your text ad, he or she will reach the LP where you make your first impression. You do not have to be a great graphic designer to create an attractive LP. Instead, you should find a designer who can make a clear LP with quality designs and images. While choosing images, one has to keep in mind that images should only be used on a landing page if it is compelling enough and supports the end goal i.e. conversion. That said, photos of real people are more effective than random images or clipart.

3. Content

A compelling headline: A headline is the first thing that a visitor will see. It should be the most compelling content on the page. The copy should match the search query and paid search ad copy as much as possible. Generally, the closer the match, the higher is the conversion rate. Make sure your ad and your landing page are closely related. You can also add the main keyword to the headline.

Body Copy: Less is often more. Additional copy on the site should not exceed 250 characters. Your value proposition should all be answers to “why?” Keep them limited to three or four bullet points and speak plainly. This is no time to get cute, either. If users cannot quickly and easily understand the benefits of your product or service, they will not hesitate to click the back button.

4. Interactivity

Are your pages with text or non-attractive images, or do you have attractive elements to capture the attention of the visitor? Just keeping an image or bolded text doesn’t make an attractive landing page. In the modern age, animated flash or video clips can be more a convincing to way to attract the visitor’s attention. The secret is to synchronize these elements with your messaging and design.

5. Load Time

Landing pages should load instantly. Users don’t like to wait, and search algorithms deduct quality score for slower pages.

Contributed by Rajasekar Ragavan

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Campaign Structure is the foremost thing that makes or breaks an account. This is where you can manage your budgets for your account. The most basic campaign structure is classified into these four campaigns, namely:

Corporate campaign is where you create clusters for your corporate keyword and its variations. In this campaign, you look into the fact whether your corporate keyword appears in your ad and in the landing page.

Core Campaign will have all the clusters of keywords that directly relate to your business. For example, if you are a used-car seller, your Core Campaigns will contain clusters like used-cars, second-hand cars, pre-owned cars, and so on. This is the campaign where you should allocate more budget as this relates to your business directly.

Competitors Campaign will have keywords of all your competitors’. In this campaign, you bid on the same keywords as your nearest competitors who affect your market share. This campaign will allow you to show your ads for competitor keywords, and if there are customers who are not satisfied with your competitors’ service or products, may switch to you if they see your ads are more convincing.

Fringe Campaign will contain keywords not directly related to your business but will contain keywords that are close to it. For example, a used-car seller’s Fringe Campaign could have “car seats,” “car performance kits,” “tires,” and so on. A small budget should be allocated to this, though it is not directly related to your business, it might attract customers who are looking to enhance their car’s performance at a smaller budget. This is where in you can chip in and offer a used-car at a good price.

Now, the question is where all you want your ad to show up. You have  three options: Search, Content and Site-targeted.

Search allows your ad to show up only on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. This is beneficial if you know that your customers search for your product on the World Wide Web.

Content allows your ad to show related content on various sites like forums, community sites or social sites. This can be used when your customers are not aware of your product and research for it on these content sites.

Site-targeted strategy allows your ads to show up on those specific sites where you want to advertise. This can be used for sites you know your customers visit often.

Other than these, you can also use Geo targeting when you are targeting specific geographic regions. In Google, you can target specific cities and its surrounding areas. Language targeting can also be used to target those customers who use certain language-specific search engines.

These are the most basic campaign structures that you should use to create an effective campaign strategy to reach your goals.

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People spend a lot of time creating tons of content, making flashy designs and graphics but little do they realize that their website architecture may play a big role in increasing traffic to their website. We have noticed many keyword-optimized websites, over the years, have performed poorly in search engines, mainly due to the fact that their website architecture was not up to the mark. From mom and pop websites to enterprise-level websites, every website needs to have good website architecture not only to ensure that the search engine spiders crawl the website effectively, but also to provide a good user experience by improving navigation and accessibility.

I’d like to share a few tips on how to make your website more user-friendly and accessible to both search engines and users by making some important changes in your website architecture.

You can have a good architectural foundation for your website by implementing corrective measures across these 5 broad areas:
•    Linking and navigational architecture
•    Content architecture
•    URL architecture
•    Server accessibility, hosting and IP architecture
•    Technical architecture

Linking and Navigational architecture:

Tip 1: Organize the information on your website into different themes or categories. As you divide the information into broad categories, place top-level links of these categories on the homepage. These categories could then be subdivided and routed to subfolders. The internal link structure of the website should enable the user to reach any page within four clicks. This will also make it easy for search engines to crawl your pages effectively without having to crawl deeply.

Linking and Navigational architecture

Tip 2: Ensure that most of your important pages are linked from the homepage.

Tip 3: In large websites, we often come across pages/sections that have no Page Rank. This is because search engines have a limit when it comes to crawling content and it could also be due to the fact that the pages are too deep within the website. Linking pages that have no Page Rank to pages that have a high Page Rank will not only ensure that your pages will be crawled and indexed, but will also get some Page Rank juice from the parent page.
Tip 4: Implementing an HTML sitemap could easily ensure that users find a way to navigate through the website easily. The sitemap should be linked from the homepage. Include keywords in these links that point from your HTML sitemaps.
Tip 5: Ensure that none of your links are embedded within JavaScript’s, Ajax, Flash or Images. Test your website using the Lynx browser to analyze if it’s being accessed by search engine crawlers.

Content architecture:

Tip 1: If you are planning to develop your website using the technologies mentioned below, you should also be aware that these could be deterrent, if you want your website to be accessible to crawlers.
-   Frames
-   Flash
-   AJAX

Ensure that an alternate version of content is used if you’re using these platforms. The content in the alternate version should be exactly similar to the content being displayed within frames, flash or AJAX; otherwise you might be flagged by search engines for cloaking.
Tip 2: If you have video or audio files on your website, ensure that these files have appropriate filenames, titles and descriptions.
Tip 3: Ensure that none of your critical, indexable content remains behind a form
Tip 4: Clean your website of canonical/duplicated URLs, as search engines treat them as duplicated pages. You can redirect the duplicated copy of the page to the original using a 301 redirect.
Tip 5: Ensure that your content is unique throughout the website. Make sure the copyright information on your website is up to date and if you notice any external website using your copy, you can file a complaint with DMCA for copyright infringement.

To be concluded in the next blog post.

Contributed by Zuheb SM

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