Clickz reports that Google is going to charge more for people low quality pay-per-click advertising that link directly to landing pages. Google has tweaked natural search algorithms to weed out junk sites. They will continue to do the same with paid search. In natural you get delisted or drop in rank. In paid you will be charged more, poor quality will cost you.
I just listened to a short overview about how to design high quality landing pages. It was by Mark Widawer of LandingPageCashMachine at Affiliate Summit.
How to Design a Quality Landing Page, 5 Tips:
- If they don't take your offer, at least get their email address (give a free report or something else of value). If you're really savvy get them to subscribe to your RSS feed and give their email at the same time.
- Split test your ads. He recommended hypertracker.com or 1shoppingcart.com (shopping cart with ad tracker).
- Spend the money or learn great copywriting. The words you use are of vital importance. http://www.breakthroughcopywriting.com/ is a resource (warning: sales page but no affiliate link, I haven't checked out the quality).
- Remove all obstacles to the sale. No distracting graphics. No links except to buy link or submit (when getting their email address). Don't put extra information that isn't needed like ‘about us' or ‘contact us'. Remember a landing page has one purpose, which is to SELL.
- Instead of thinking how you want to increase your conversion rate by 1% instead think of it as how to reduce the rate of failure by 1%.
Raad Google's landing page and site quality guidelines.