Increase your Quality Score

It is often said that content is king online, and when it comes to getting love from the Big G using Adwords, having quality content on your landing pages is no exception. But often times, the laziness often attributed with being a PPC affiliate gets the best of us, making building quality landing pages a royal pain in the ass.

Basically, the secret to a good quality score with Adwords follows many of the same best practices normally performed when optimizing a website for SEO. Using proper titles, descriptions, h1, h2, h3 tags, having a privacy policy, contact page, about page, and a disclaimer are just a few of the on page factors that can determine how Google evaluates your quality score.

But in terms of relevant content, there are a few shortcuts we can use when adding quality to our landing pages, or at least simulate the “appearance of quality” as far as the Google spiders are concerned. Warning: Now entering Blackhat PPC territory.

The best example is a real example, so I’m gonna break it down as simple as I can so that even the greenest of PPC n00bs can understand how to do this:

Skills required:
1) some basic html & css knowledge
2) a little php
3) a working brain

Let’s pretend that we are promoting an offer in the “online education” vertical. Our seed keywords, meaning our keywords that have the highest monthly search volumes will be keywords such as:

online education, distance education, online degree, online learning, etc.

What I’m about to show you can be done a number of different ways with a number of different sources, but for the sake of this example, I am going to use Wikipedia as my content source. Wikipedia is an enormous website, with many high page ranked articles often appearing in the top placements in the SERPs.

Here’s what you do:

1) Go to Wikipedia.org, search for one of your “seed” keywords. I’m going to search for “Distance Education“.

2) The resulting article that I found is a PR 6 (page rank 6), filled with unique keyword rich content based around the seed keyword “distance education”.

3) Using your mouse cursor, select and copy the entirety of the article, then paste the copied text into a new text file. I advise using notepad or something similar, and I would avoid using Microsoft Word at all costs as html code will also be copied, which you don’t want. We need the raw text.

4) Save this text file with the name of your seed keyword, giving it a .php file extension. In this case, I would save my text file as “distance-education.php”. Repeat the above steps for more of your seed keywords, saving each unique article as a separate PHP file.

5) To increase the relevance of the seed keyword in the eyes of the search engine spider, I’m going to add emphasis to the seed keyword “distance education” by bolding it each time it appears in the article. Open the article with your a text editor, or Dreamweaver if you have it.

Open the Find & Replace window. (CTRL+H is the keyboard shortcut for Find & Replace)

To quickly bold each found instance of “distance education”, I’ll do a find of “distance education” and replace it with distance education. Then save the file.

7) Upload this PHP file to a special directory on your web server dedicated to hosting “included” files. I’ll sometimes call this directory “data or inc”. It’s really up to you as long as you remember the path to where you’ve stored your files.

8 ) Now the trick here is to call the article using PHP so that the contents are dynamically “stuffed” into your landing page. To do this, open the landing page you plan to send traffic to with your html editor. Somewhere above the closing tag, call the article using the following code:

Again, in this example, if I were to call the “distance-education.php” file and the landing page I was using was this domain, I would do something like this:

9) At this point, unless we make some modifications to the the style sheet of our landing page, this article will be visible to our real users and the search engine spiders. But since we are simply stuffing content to get a little extra love from the search engines, we are going to hide the article content from our users using a few simple CSS mods.

First off, we need to define a class to be attributed to the dynamic code we are stuffing behind the scenes. A CSS class is defined either in an external style sheet, or on the existing html document.

Personally, I prefer to keep all of my CSS styles in an external style sheet for simplicity, and call the sheet in the head of my landing page. To do this, create a new file (again in notepad or Dreamweaver), and call it “style.css”.

Once we’ve made the necessary modifications to the style sheet, it can be called in the landing page by inserting the following code above the section of your document:

Inside our style.css file, insert the following code:

.img {
display: none;
visibility: hidden;
}

What this small snippet of CSS code does is create a class called “img” (meaning “image”), with both the display and visibility properties set to not show the contents of the class on the screen. By calling our class “.img”, we are in a subtle way disguising the real intention of the class.

You can name your class anything you want pretty much, but you need to be inconspicuous about it to not draw too much attention to the fact that you are stuffing other people’s content. For example, you wouldn’t name your class “.stuffedcontent” for obvious reasons.

An img class would be a common occurrence on any web page and probably wouldn’t draw too much attention to the casual Google editor. We want to fly under the radar as much as possible.

10) Now that we have created our style sheet with our hidden class, we need to wrap the call to the dynamic code with our class definition. To do this, simply wrap:

around the code. The end result should look something like this:

So there you have it; dynamic content stuffed based on the primary seed keyword to add relevant content to your landing pages that the spiders love, yet your real visitors can’t see. Once you’ve followed the above steps and uploaded all of your saved files to your server, simply visit your landing page and view its source code to verify that the content is being properly stuffed. (CTRL+U to view source)

Note: Your landing page file extension must end in “.php” for this to work. If you’re currently using the .html or .htm extensions, simply rename them to .php and reupload. There is a work around for this using .htaccess, but I won’t get into that here.

Also, there is a more advanced method that you can use to include stuffed content from URLs instead of static text files, but then you get into problems with caching, and could potentially slow your web server down considerably as it tries to pull real-time content based on your chosen URLs or keywords. There are also tools out there that automate this entire process, but if you’re on a budget, this strategy works just as well.

I regularly use the above process to stuff content for each of my primary keywords in a PPC campaign, giving me improved quality scores. I wouldn’t do this for each keyword of course, but maybe for 3-5 of my primary keywords, adding the unique calls to each article with the PHP include.

I block the /data directory with robots.txt. Its pretty easy to do.

Create a file called “robots.txt”
Add the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /data/

Then upload it to the root of your server.

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