I have just read the post from Lisa Baronne on Blue Clay Blog, reporting from the SMX advanced 2008. I won’t talk about the whole post but only the information from Michael Gray and his tests on the quality score. The reason I want to talk about that is simply because we actually made some observation today in  the office.

We have a website where we sell mobile phone deals. We are obviously running PPC and we actually made the observation today that Google was allocating a completely different Min CPC to different pages on our website (for the same keywords and same adwords account - only the destination Url is changing).

We are selling the new Nokia N96 and are running some landing page test. For the test, some of the landing pages are not SEOed yet (as just created for exclusively PPC at the moment), and we had the bad surprise to see Google allocating a MinCPC above 50p (1$, which is 10 times higher than the average on site). We then change the destination Url to a page already optimized for SEO with relevant keywords, and the MinCPC became just 5p (0.1$). I then read the article I mentioned above and we conclude that we need to rank in SEO our pages in order to boost our quality score (very good for me actually as I’m trying to convince the company to be a little bit more agressive regarding SEO ).

The whole idea is: The higher your landing page is in organic listing, the better will be the Quality score for that page. The reason Google has adopted this strategy (i’m just assuming) is simply to avoid “bridge landing page” and “cheap website” often used (and abused) in affiliate marketing. So what do we do to our page concretely?

Let’s take the 3 basics points in SEO, and consider we need to apply those rules to our New Nokia N96 fresh landing page.

Criterias on Page

The criterias on page include the title tag, the H1/H2 tag, and the content on the page itself. The title tag should contain at least 10 words repeating the keyword targeted with its variations. In our case the title tage would look like this: Find Nokia N96 Mobile Phone Deals, N96 8GB Reviews, N96 Phones.

The H1 (still people forgot that tag - unbelievable), should clearly give the topic of the page and should look like this: Find Nokia N96 8GB Deals.

We need then to talk about the handset. So reviews would be in our case very useful as it will create relevant content. A simple thing to do as well is having your targeted keyword from your content once in bold and once in italic. That’s all for the criterias on page.

Criterias on site

Criterias on site are the navigational and link structure on your website. Therefore you should make sure that’s easy to find your landing page if someone goes on your website from another page. You can do several things here to improve those criterias. In our case, we are now having links on every page of the site for the top sellers in order to be sure those ones will be found easily. Another tip there, it’s always good to have a blog to talk about your business. I will not sell the corporate blog in that post (it’s not the purpose). It’s easy to talk about your product and services, so write a post at least to create links with the anchor text specific to your landing page. Another important point: spiders does not like flash, flex or Javascript code, they just don’t read them, so any navigation within those codes should have a parallele HTML navigation, at least for Google spiders.

Criterias off site (link building)

Well, that one is the hardest part to do, as simple as it rely on other websites which do not belong to you :-(. But, still, there are ways to create good backlinks for your landing page, and it’s easy. The first one coming to my mind is to create an article about your service or product. In our case the article could be a comparaison between the New N96 comparing to the old N95: create incoming links from your text using your specific keyword as anchor text (in our case N96 or Nokia N96/N95…) and finally, submit your articles to articles directory. How to find them? Simply Google “Article directory” and submit to the ones on the first page (natural listing). Another thing you can do is a press release. In our website, we are so happy about the deals we have for the Nokia N96, that we want to tell the world about it! How can we do that, simply by writing a press release, using the same concept for links to create from the text. Then use a news ditributions submission services who will submit your press release to relevant website.

That’s all! This will definitely boost your quality score, but also your natural listing in fact! I’m a bit surprised though that the quality score is calculated on criterias used for SEO now. Adwords was THE alternative to SEO, and now, in order to perform well in PPC, you need to provide SEO work anyway.

Adwords has no impact on SEO, however SEO has an impact on Adwords.