Website Optimization Techniques

Here is a quick tip on how to optimize your landing page text link Ads for relevancy to the visitors search query.

When people search on Google, MSN or Yahoo! for something, they end up on a search results page that has a url including the search terms that they used.

If they see your site listed and click on the link, they visit your page and their browser will usually reveal the url that they came from unless they are a privacy nut that denies all data to you via browser settings. Then you could maybe serve them up some special free content instead?

No, don’t do that since they may have come from another page on your website. So if the referrer information is not available you can’t act on it.

But, normally, you can get hold of the referring url that contains the search terms in an environment variable called “HTTP_REFERER”. Make note of the way this is spelt!

Then, using some PHP or maybe Javascript code, you can filter out the search terms.

Now we can use this valuable information to make our Ads more relevant to improve all kinds of things like the user experience, the relevancy of the Ads to what the visitor searched for and possibly improve the quality score for PPC landing pages.

The idea now is to insert these search terms on your page. I suggest placing them right before an Adsense Ad unit to try and get the Ads in that unit to be most relevant to what the visitor is looking for. But this is hit and miss since only milliseconds are available for the poor old Ad bot to select the Ads.

But what works extremely well is to use an affiliate link that is a search link. The idea here is to get hold of an affiliate link that contains a search term and replace the keywords with the ones we grabbed from the referring url. Also, we can insert our keywords in the anchor text of the link.

So now the visitor gets to see a super-relevant link leading to your affiliate page and that page will be targeted to their original search terms.

To get hold of this kind of affiliate link you need to go into your affiliate member’s area and hunt around for any links that you can generate that contain some keywords. For example, a direct link to a search page on the merchant’s website.

So I hope that made sense and got you thinking about how best to optimize a page for search keyword relevancy.

Of course, you need code to put this strategy into action. So how do I go about handing you the code? Should I sell it, give it away for free or let you donate random amounts of dosh depending on how useful it was to you?

Best regards,

Mr MultiVar

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