Websites thrive on traffic.  Business websites need customers.  Blogs need consumers to read them and subscribe.  

As a website owner, you'll probably spending a large portion of your time driving traffic to you website.  There are several ways to bring traffic.  You can optimize pages for the search engines.  You can write articles and submit them.  You can use social networking to build relationships on the internet.

One very important method of driving traffic is Google Adwords.  Adwords has one important difference from all the other methods mentioned.  Adwords costs money.   You design an ad for your website, and then Google places your ad on their search engine results, in the paid or sponsored links section.  You pay Google every time someone clicks your ad.

However, Adwords has advantages that offset the costs.  Why should you use Google Adwords to drive traffic?  What are the arguments for Adwords?

1) Google Adwords will start sending your website traffic immediately.

It takes time for a website to rank high enough to appear on organic search results.  It takes time to write articles and submit them.  It takes time to build a social network.  All the other methods of driving traffic require an investment of time.  These alternatives require hours of work to establish, and then may take weeks or months to show results.

Adwords will start sending traffic to your website today.  As soon as you create a campaign and an ad, you can begin getting traffic.  

2) Google will help you every step of the way.

Google makes a significant portion of their revenue from Adwords ads.  Google makes money by you participating in Adwords and wants you to succeed.  Google publishes user guides, blogs and other information to make using Adwords as easy as possible.

3) Adwords provides the information about your campaign that you need to succeed.

Adwords provides keyword research tools so you know what consumers are searching for.  Adwords helps you evaluate your campaign after it is created.  Adwords supplies you with the impressions, click through rates and costs of you campaign.  It informs you of the Quality Score for your ads, on a scale of 1 to 10.  It offers advice on how to improve the Quality Score.

4) You can control the cost of Adwords with the proper strategy.

Knowing how to obtain a good Quality Score for your ad can reduce your cost per click.  A well optimized campaign can deliver traffic for just a few cents per click.  The Free Adwords Strategy Guide describes step by step how to optimize your ads.

5) Anyone can obtain the top ad positions.

Adwords values quality over price.  Adwords doesn't simply award the highest ad position to the highest bidder.  The ad quality score is the primary factor in ad positions.  That means you can advertise in highly competitive markets, using a good Quality Score to beat out other advertisers who are simply spending more.  The Free Adwords Strategy Guide reveals exactly how to get a good Quality Score.

Your Adwords Ad fell off the first page of results for one reason.  The quality score was poor.  You may have heard other factors caused it, but the quality score is the reason.

The initial quality score is determined by the relevance of your ad and landing page to your keyword.  If you optimize both your ad and your landing page for the specific keyword, you should have a good initial quality score. 

You optimize your ad by using the keyword in the ad.  Put your keyword in the headline and/or the description.  It's also a good idea to have the keyword in the url of your landing page, which puts it in the destination url.  In addition, you can put the keyword somewhere in your display url, since it won't affect the destination url.

You optimize your landing page by applying the same techniques as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would have you do.  

Use the keyword in the page name or path.  For example, if your keyword is "college football" name your page "college-football.php" or "college-football.htm".  Adwords will recognize keywords in the Url of the page.

On the page itself, you can apply the following Search Engine Optimization techniques.  All of these are helpful when Adwords is determining the relevance of your landing page.

* use the keyword in the page title.

* use the keyword and related keywords in the keyword meta tag.

* use the keyword in the description meta tag.

* use the keyword inside "h1" html tags on the page.

* use the keyword throughout the content of your page.

Another technique to raise your quality score is to have links to your sitemap, privacy policy and contact us pages on your landing page.  Google likes your website to have these types of pages.

The quality score is also affected by the ads CTR.  As your ad gains impressions and clicks, Adwords computes your click through rate (CTR).  Adwords draws conclusions about your ads relevancy from the CTR.  Google assumes that if your CTR is high, above 0.5%, then your ad is relevant and your quality score goes up.  Conversely, if your CTR is below 0.5% Adwords assumes it is not relevant and lowers your quality score.

An inactive ad has either an initial quality score that was poor that made it all but impossible to get a CTR and it went inactive.  Or, the CTR for a good initial quality score is below 0.5% and it damaged the quality score to a point that the ad went inactive.

You have 3 options to fix the problem.

1) Delete the keyword.  This is often a good solution because the poor quality of the keyword stops becoming a drag on the quality score of your entire campaign.  Campaigns have a quality score based on all the keywords, so a poor keyword can damage the quality of other keywords.

2) Improve the quality score.  This generally means improving the CTR by rewriting the ad sales copy to more persuasive.  The more appealing the ad is to consumers, then more clicks you will get.

3) Increase your maximum CPC bid.

 In September of 2008, AdWords changed the Quality Score calculation to include the Landing Page Quality. That means AdWords now considers the relevance of the Landing Page to the keyword when determining Quality Score of your ad. Fortunately, it's easy to build a better Landing Page. Just follow these steps to improve your Quality Score.

1) Consider your Domain Name

The domain name of your website is important. You want the domain name to be the keyword or to be in the general market for the keyword. You can't have a domain name for every single keyword, but try to get your main keywords in the domain name. If you main keywords are in your domain, odds are your other keywords are related to it.

Google AdWords considers the domain when assigning the quality score. Use hyphens in your domain name to separate individual words. This will assist Google in evaluating your domain name. For example, a good domain name for a website about AdWords Marketing would be AdWords-marketing-tool.com. The domain name contains the keywords AdWords and marketing and they are hyphenated to make them readily apparent.

There is some debate to using hyphens in your domain name. On one hand the hyphens make it easy for AdWords and Search Engines to distinguish the individual keywords. On the other hand, human visitors tend to forget the hyphens and manually type Urls without them. The solution is simple. You should purchase both domains, with and without hyphens. You should use the hyphenated domain in all your marketing materials. But, you also have the domain without hyphens should a visitor type your domain without them.

Domain names are only a few dollars for an entire year. There is no reason why you could not have both domains. In addition, you should have unique domains for every market you are selling to. Domain registration fees are very small when compared to your overall advertising budget.

2) The file name of the Landing Page

You can name your Landing Page file anything you want. Why not make it the keywords the page is tailored for? For example, if the keyword is "AdWords marketing", name your landing page file AdWords-marketing.php. This accomplishes two things.

First, AdWords will recognize the keywords in the destination URL. It's another opportunity to get you keyword in the AdWords ad. Every time you do, AdWords will boost the Quality Score.

Second, human visitors will also recognize keywords in the landing page URL. It will help convince them that your landing is the page they are a looking for.

3) The title of the page should be the keyword

Each page has a title. You can make your landing page title be the keyword.

4) Use the keyword in the meta tags

Put meta tags on your landing page. Make sure the keyword meta tags contains your keyword. Plus, make sure the description tag also contains the keyword.

5) Add a heading tag with the keyword.

Google recognizes the heading "h1" tags on your landing page. Put these tags on your landing page, wrapped around your keyword.

6) Use the keyword in the content

Place the keyword in the content of the page. You don't want to over do it, but where applicable use your keywords in the content.

The following is an example of an HTML page targeted to the keywords "AdWords Marketing".

<html>
<head>
<title>AdWords Marketing</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="AdWords Marketing, ..."/>
<meta name="description" content="AdWords Marketing ... "/>
 ...
</head>

<body>
<h1>AdWords Marketing</h1>
 ...
</body>
</html>

Every website about Adwords gives some opinion about what keyword matches to use.  Some say never use the broad match and stick to phrase match.  Most advise to qualify phrase or broad match Keywords with negative keywords.  But you rarely have anyone talking about the exact match.  Lets examine the benefits of the under used exact match.

First, you never have to worry about Negative Keywords with exact match.  If you are after the keyword "quality score" you don't need to worry about eliminating "air" or "sound".  If the consumer used those terms, it wouldn't trigger the exact match.  It is already qualified, and it increases as you get more long tailed.

Second, you can skip all the Dynamic Keyword Insertion crap.  Sure, DKI is awesome if you are lazy.  Look at some of the big names using it, like Target.  They just put the token in the headline and have a generic ad for Target.  Remember that DKI does nothing for the quality score.  What's the plus?  You get to have the consumers search term right there in the ad text.  That's good for generating a high CTR.

Guess what?  Use exact match on a single keyword in a single ad group, and you'll know what the search term was.  That's the beauty of exact match.  You can put the search term in your ad because you know exactly what it will be.  You'll get the same the CTR increase you would with DKI.  Plus, you'll get the quality score increase of having your keyword in the ad text that DKI won't do.  That gives exact match a leg up on DKI.

You'll also know exactly what search term hit your landing page.  You can tailor your content for the exact search term.  You can accomplish the same with DKI passing the search term as a parameter.  However with DKI you'll never be able to anticipate what the search term would be.  You wind up with grammatically poor content.

In a hot market you'll want both the quality score increase and the CTR increase.  It'll allow you to bid on keywords that might well be beyond the scope of your budget with phrase or broad matches.

Give exact match a try with your best keywords.  You may be pleasantly surprised at the results. 

 Adwords began calculating Quality Scores for ads for each consumer search in September 2008. Part of the new calculation is page load time. You'll learn what is page load time, how does it affect your Quality Score and what can you do to improve it.

What does page load time mean?

Page load time is the time it takes for your page to render after it is requested. The life cycle of a page is straightforward.

1) The request for the page is made

2) The server will perform any server side processing, like dynamically generating content or accessing a database. When the page is completely constructed, it will proceed to the next step. NOTE: Static HTML pages do not have server side processing, only PHP, JSP or ASP.NET pages have server side processing.

3) The server begins transmitting the response over the internet

4) The client computer receives the response

5) The client begins rendering the response in a browser window. Additional requests are made for flash scripts, graphics and javascript.

6) When the page is completely rendered, and all other requests are complete, the page has loaded.
Adwords must really be measuring the time from the request until the response is read. I doubt Google can actually be attempting to time to render the page on the client computer, and make the child request for graphics and so forth. Google would have to add some javascript code to the page in order to know when the client side rendering was complete. I seriously doubt they would do this.

How does it affect your Quality Score?

Google has this to say about why it considers page load time.

"Two reasons: First, users have the best experience when they don't have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate."

Based on this paragraph it seems Google is trying to crack down on Advertisers using server side redirects and interstitial/ad pages. A server side redirect would be when the destination url is requested, the server side scripting language redirects the request to another url. This really performs two requests, and thus increases the page load time. An interstitial page is an advertisement page that is shown (briefly) before the content, and may be achieved with a redirect.

It also seems that Google is saying if your page takes too much to respond, it's likely doing something sneaky.
What can you do to improve your page load time?

1) Optimize your server side scripting

If you do use PHP, JSP or ASP.NET, make sure your server side code is optimized. This is especially true when using a database. You need to optimize both your database, and your code for speed.

2) Get dedicated web hosting

Most cheap web hosting happens on a shared server. That means that many websites from many website authors are all on the same server. All of these websites compete for server resources, like bandwidth and memory. Heavy traffic to some other website on a shared server can slow your page load time. A dedicated server is one where only your website(s) resides on it. It's more expensive, but you get dedicated resources.

3) Compress the size of your page

A web page is really just a file. That file must be transmitted from your server to the client computer over the internet. If you can decrease the size of the file, the file will transmit faster. You can compress your pages by removing white space. You can remove any unnecessary HTML tags. You can use relative urls instead of absolute urls. Do anything to decrease the size for the file.

4) Lose the Flash Animation

Flash animation is generally rendered on the client side, so it may not factor into the Page Load time. But then again it may. Either way, Flash animation tends to be slow, so get rid of it for the sake of your customers. Sure it looks great, but you can't afford to lose sales because nobody waits around for the Flash animation load.

5) Strip out unnecessary elements from the page

Again, elements rendering on the client may not affect the page load time. Then again they just might. Remove any unnecessary graphics or images. These take a long time to load. Minimize javascript or CSS includes. Additional requests need to be made for these files, so keep it to a minimum.

6) Optimize your page

As a final effort, you can optimize the HTML itself. For example, table HTML tags tend to render slower than a CSS/Div layout. If you have tables, you might consider switching to a CSS/Div layout.

 You know I recommend a strategy of one adgroup per keyword.  This strategy allows you to have a landing and ad tailored to your keyword.  This creates relevancy between the keyword, the adgroup and the landing page.  Relevancy translates into higher quality scores.  Higher quality scores mean lower CPC, which saves you money.  Higher quality also translates to higher ad positions, thus getting you more traffic.

We've gone over what it takes to create relevant landing pages.  You optimize a page for Adwords relevance the same way you would optimize for Search Engines (SEO).  You use the keyword in the page filename.  You use the keyword in the page title and meta tags.  You use the keyword in the heading tags.  You use the keyword within the content of the page.

But do you know how to create a relevant ad?  There is one technique.  That technique is to use the keyword in the ad as much as possible.  Adwords wants to see the keyword in the ad, plain and simple. 

You might be thinking you'll just use Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) and that will get your keyword in the ad.  But it won't work.  First DKI works with the consumers the search term, not your keyword.  Unless you are using exact match, this two may not be the same thing.  Second, DKI doesn't count toward quality.  Adwords is doing the substitution; they know you are using DKI.  Adwords has made it clear that DKI won't boost the quality of your ad.

On a side note, the beauty of the one ad group per keyword strategy is you know what the consumers search term is without DKI.  If you sue phrase and exact matches, you know the search term is your keyword or at the very least contains it.

Regardless of that fact, when you work with one ad group per keyword, you can literally put the keyword in your ad.  This is what will signal Adwords that you have highly relevant ad.

For example, imagine your keyword is "Rome Hotels".  Your ad could then look something like this...

headline:       Rome Hotels
description 1:  Planning a trip to Rome?
description 2:  Find hotels now.
display url:   MyDomain . com/Rome Hotels
dest. url:      http :// www . MyDomain . com/rome-hotels.html

For our purposes here, you can ignore the description 1 and description 2 lines.  You'll need good sales copy there.  You refine that copy with split testing.  But sales copy is a different topic.

For now, notice how many time the keyword Rome Hotels appears in the ad.

First, you see it in the headline.  Were you to use DKI, you'd also put it in the headline.  The idea is that the consumer is likely to click the ad when the headline matches the search term.  With one adgroup per keyword you get the exact same benefit.

But, the ad above also gets a quality score boost from Adwords.  Why?  Because the keyword is literally appearing the ad itself.  It is not sales copy or DKI.

Second, the keyword is the display url.  The display url has to be a valid url, and spaces aren't valid.  Therefore the spaces have been replaced with dashes.  Both Adwords and a consumer can still identify the keywords with dashes.  That means we again get a quality score boost from Adwords when it sees the keyword.  Plus, we display the keyword to the consumer again, further compelling them to click.

Finally, the keyword is in the destination url. The consumer won't see the destination url but Adwords will.  Both the ad and landing page will get a quality score boost for having the landing page filename the same as the keyword.

I recently launched a new website and Adwords campaign.  My ad groups, keywords and landing pages have a 9 out of 10 quality score.  This is a brand new website and a brand new campaign.  Adwords calls this a "great" Quality Score. I'll describe the exact steps I took so you can duplicate them and get great quality scores as well.

First, the market is highly competitive.  It's a market that all major news outlets said was hot and growing online in December 2008 despite the recession.  I have over 500 keywords.  I'll talk more about them in a minute, but I want to give you an idea of the scale of the campaign.

I started with the landing pages.  I have unique, tailored landing page for each keyword.  The whole key to a great quality score is having relevant ads and landing pages for your keywords.  I recommend a strategy of having only one keyword per ad group. 

I'll briefly describe the steps to build a tailored landing page.  You start with domain relevant to your market.  Plus your domain should only be about your market.  You don't want a domain, or a subdomain that covers many topics.  Keep your domain targeted.  Next, each page has the keyword as the landing page.  For example, if the keyword is "college football", the page is named college-football.php.  That puts the keyword in the url.

For each page, I have the keyword in the title tags, keywords meta tag, and description meta tag.  I also have the keyword in the heading (h1) tags on the page.  There is content tailored for the keyword on the landing page.

The last thing I did for each landing page was add a link to my sitemap, contact us and privacy policy pages.  Google wants your website to look like more than a single page.  It also wants you to be transparent and offer contact info and policies.

The next step was to tackle the keywords.  I had about 20 high traffic keywords.  These were not long tailed keywords.  They were the top volume producers for the market.  I wanted to append U.S. cities to the front of each keyword.  This would turn high volume keywords into long tails, and simultaneously target geographic areas.  This was the best way to attack this highly competitive market.  After appending the cities to the keywords I had a list of over 500 keywords.

Finally, I need to create the Adwords campaign.  I created a single Ad Group for each keyword.  That allowed me to have a highly targeted Ad for the keyword and use the customized landing page.  Again, the key to good quality scores is having tailored Ads and landing pages for your keyword.  If everything is relevant, you get the good or great quality score. 

That's how I generated a new campaign for a new website and got 9 out of 10 quality scores.

I still have some work to do.  First, while I have some 9 out of 10, most are 8 and a few are 7.  I do not have any 10 or 10 scores.  I'm still chasing those.  Second, the expense is high because the market is so competitive.  The good news is I have CTRs anywhere from 5% to 20%.  I'm bidding a high CPC to get that high CTR for the first few weeks.  Over the long haul, I will be able to lower the CPC and still have top placement due to the high CTRs.