Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Pleasing the Spider

Glenn Livingston of PayPerClickSearchMarketing.com experiments vigorously and shares generously what he discovers about ways to get Google to love your landing pages. Much of what follows is at least partially attributable to Glenn.

Demonstrate relevance

If Google got a tattoo, it would read, “Relevance.” As applied to landing pages, it means that what you say about your page must match the keyword as closely as possible. Ideally, the biggest keyword in the ad group is included in the title tag, the description tag, the first paragraph, and some of the header tags. Even a few years ago, this sort of keyword matching was needed only for search engine optimization (SEO), but AdWords now includes a significant SEO component.

The title tag

At the very top of your web browser, above the URL even, you can read the “title” of the page you're visiting. For example, the title for www.watercoloursecrets.com is “Watercoloursecrets.com — Watercolour Painting Made Easy.” The title tells Google what your page is about. (Most human visitors to your site never even notice the title, so use it to show Google the connection between your keyword and your landing page.)

You or your webmaster can edit the title tag in any HTML-authoring program. You can find it in the source code for your page, near the top:

<title>Watercoloursecrets.com — Watercolour Painting Made Easy</title>

If your landing page has a nondescriptive title, like “Page 3” or “Welcome to VintageDirtySocks.com ...