Digging through Google’s advice to webmaster you will find many useful suggestions and reminders.
In doing this one will come upon a definition for the three main components of a high quality website:
- Relevant, original, (and authentic) content
- Transparency
- Navigability.
Along with the definition for these three main components, Google offers a covenant “Maintaining a positive user experience in these areas will help improve your site’s landing page quality.”
Strong words. Google is very invested in the promotion of quality websites that give users a positive user experience. In fact, they put their money where their mouth is. When bidding with adwords for position in the SERP (search engine results page) the higher the quality of your landing page the less you have to pay for top position. That’s right. You pay less per click for the best spot if your page is higher quality than the competition. More about this later. For the moment just take it as read that they are very invested in promoting quality websites with quality user experience.
So what are these three things they consider the main components of high quality websites.
1. Relevant, Original, (and Authentic) Content
This speaks to the content of your page. The actual stuff you are presenting. You know the words and images that present something other than navigation and branding. This may come as a surprise to those that figured the internet was just a place to lay purchasing traps in the hopes of capturing customers and making thereby making money. Long ago, during the first few days of the internet, all you could find was relevant and original content. Posting content in those days was no easy task. Thus, anyone that was making the effort to present content was doing so for something they believed in. Granted some folks were highly invested and believed in content that made me wonder about the possible future of the human race. Even so, it was evident from their web pages that they believed in what they were doing. Unfortunately it did not take long before the invention of the banner ad and the new paradigm — a web page became an excuse for housing as many banner ads as one could stuff on it.
If you are using adwords to promote your web page then you MUST be making money from viewership. You have to. If you are paying $$ per click you have to make enough $$ per visit to feed the fund that pays for the clicks. Or, perhaps you have a mysterious advertising budget which is funding the promotional campaign. This could be to generate branding, new product roll-out, or any number of valid reasons. Advertising budgets independent of web page ROI (return on investment) are a special topic we can discuss at another time. For the moment, let’s take it as given that for most of us, any time we use adwords to bring readership to our website we have to generate enough $$ to pay for the click-throughs. This means we must be selling something on the landing page. This something can be a product or a “make a donation.” But there must be something, otherwise adwords becomes a black-hole into which we throw money.
This is all by way of saying that in addition to the presentation of relevant and original content you will also need to be making a sales pitch. More about this another time. I just wanted to mention what I consider the elephant in the room when it comes to discussion of page content. It is all well and good to get high and mighty about content, but the reality for anyone driving traffic to a website is: the landing page must pay for itself.
Relevance
Relevance is related specifically to the ad that drove the traffic to your landing page. That is where the phrase “landing page” comes from. They are landing on your page after clicking on an ad.
If the first thought that enters the mind of a visitor coming to your web page from an ad is “Hmmm, is this the right page? Or, did I click on the wrong button?” then you fail. Put your ad side by side with your web page. Can the average Joe on the street see the relationship? If not you fail.
Another form of fail is advertising a single product then linking to a page with multiple products. If you advertise a specific product it is wrong to make the visitor hunt through a collection of products to locate the one that motivated them to click on the ad in the first place. This will cause confusion. This is a fail. If you want to suggest other alternatives, put them below the fold. The fold is the imaginary line that represents the bottom of your page as viewed in the browser. This means the visitor will need to scroll before seeing the content below the fold. The value to the fold is that you can have content on the page (no click required to find it) without that content confusing the visitor during those most important first three seconds.
Relevance basically comes down to “say what you mean and mean what you say.”
Originality
Original is easy to understand. If the content is new, fresh, inventive, or novel it is original. If the content is a copy and paste from somewhere else then it is not original. Ideally your content should be unique — can’t be found on any other website. Well, with billions of web pages “can’t be found on another site” is bound to become pretty darn difficult. So in practical terms what does original mean?
To start with, copy and paste pretty much guarantees the content is not original. There are many reasons that you could find yourself using copy and paste to generate content on a landing page.
One reason you could find yourself using copy and paste to generate a landing page is: the product’s parent company requested you to do this. In their effort to encourage the creation of quality pages that properly reflect the nature of their product they can encourage you to reuse their marketing pitches and their marketing graphics.
If your page is the same (or nearly the same) as a page on another website then the pages are considered to be mirrors of each other. This is bad. Pages that replicate the look and feel of a parent site are said to mirror the parent page. Don’t do this.
Another reason that you could find yourself using copy and paste is to take advantage of the success of another reseller. “Hey, their page is making them a ton of money. I think I will copy their page so I can make a ton of money.” This creates a mirror page. This is bad. It is bad because you are stealing. It is also bad because you will be caught.
Authentic
Google did not suggest authentic as a descriptor. This is my own invention to cover the special case of bridge (or redirect) pages. A bridge page can be relevant. A bridge page can be original. But they still fail because they are not authentic. There is no real intention to give the visitor anything. A bridge page is just a bridge, a connection, between your ad and the true landing page on the affiliate website. The whole purpose of the bridge page is to grab visitors from an SERP have them visit your page so that you can then re-link to the affiliate website after including your affiliate identification code as part of the link.
Redirect pages are another form of bridge page. The same type of page with a name that may be more familiar to some. A redirect page’s sole purpose is to redirect traffic to a parent (affiliate) company.
Bridge pages are the worst. A bridge page is not really even a page.
In Part 2 of this article we shall address Transparency.
In the Part #3 of this article we discuss the effect of navigation on the quality of a visitor’s experience.