The art and science of landing page optimization is not something that you can master in a day or a year. No matter how optimized your landing pages are for conversion, there are plenty of ways to test things out and improve on your existing results. Whether it’s offering multiple choices on a landing page, optimizing your font, or adding conversion friendly images to your landing pages, you almost never run out of ways to optimize your landing page and improve your conversions.

One of the most popular ways to improve conversion rate on landing pages and web pages in general is by targeting your traffic based on the place from which they come to your website. Let’s say someone is searching for something on Google and just happens to land on one of your blog posts. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could reach out to them, give them an incentive to sign up for your newsletter, or share something exclusively with them?

There are obviously more ways to use this tactic to increase conversions. Many top affiliate marketers have struck deals with their affiliate programs to display a logo or brand on the top of the merchant’s landing page when people click on their landing pages. These marketers have spent time building a brand, and they want their visitors to go about completing landing page forms with more peace of mind. Implementation could always be an issue, but if you have a decent coder, it’s pretty easy to get it done with server-side scripting.

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You may have heard about Google cracking down on advertisers who are not using their “real” URLs in their display URL. A few years ago, Google was a bit lenient when it came to dealing with people who were using redirects or other addresses in their display URL section. But that would open Google to a lot of liabilities, which is why Google is tightening the rules and adding new guidelines for advertisers.

When it comes to choosing a URL for your business or landing page, you want to make sure it’s something that is brandable, catchy, and short (with emphasis on short). A domain name that is too long and contains too many words is just tough to remember and hard to push through Google Adwords and other advertising websites. I have found that many marketers just get too greedy when it comes to choosing their domain name. They not only go for longer URLs (with keywords), they don’t even register their own domain. Running a business using blogspot is not too ideal these days.

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If you thought Google was getting annoying with all its new policies, you are going to have to brace yourself for even more guidelines from Google. Google is trying awfully heart to cover itself against liabilities and protect consumers in the process. Whether that has helped small businesses that make money off of Google is another story. While I am not a big fan of a lot of policies that Google has adopted in the past, I actually agree with the latest move by Google to address issues caused by hosted domains (e.g. those on blogspot or Wordpress). There are plenty of people who are spamming on Google by using free hosting services or hosted portals such as Wordpress. The new URL policy addresses that.

Here is what Google is asking its advertisers to do: display the full URL of your website if you are on a domain that hosts multiple websites. Here are a few nuggets from the announcement:

all ads leading to sites on hosted domains will need to have display URLs that accurately reflect their destinations….

Incorrect:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: blogspot.com

Correct:

Destination URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com
Display URL: adwords.blogspot.com

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As someone who has worked in the advertising space in the past, I can tell you that a lot of people are hurting by all the changes that Google has made to its Adwords program. We are not talking about the major changes. Everybody knows that your ad ranking depends on your CPC and your quality score. We also know that there are plenty of things that Google doesn’t tell you when it adjusts your quality score or slaps your campaigns altogether. But most often, people are blaming Google or keyword tools for things they are responsible for.

A lot of people believe Google Adwords is some magic service that will help drive traffic to your website and convert them at the same time. So they don’t pay enough attention to how they are putting their feet forward with their landing page. Getting slapped by Google can be an eye opener for a lot of folks. I have seen so many companies that have poor quality flash landing pages up and hope for some miracle. Some companies don’t even have a product yet, but they don’t even use their landing page to collect names or give people a way to find out more about their future products.

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