Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines

I've outlined some site-building guidelines to better serve bloggers,
advertisers, and publishers. When advertisers'
sites reflect these guidelines, two important things happen:

• The money you spend on ads will be more likely to turn into paying customers.
• Users develop a trust in the positive experience provided after
  clicking on ads (and this turns in to additional targeted leads
  for you).

Furthermore, following site guidelines will help improve your
landing page quality score. As a component of your keywords' overall
Quality Scores, a high landing page quality score can affect your ads in three ways:

1. Decrease your keywords' minimum bids
2. Increase your keyword-targeted ads' position on the content network
3. Improve the chances that your placement-targeted ads will win a position on your targeted placements

Three main components of a quality website:

• relevant and original content

Relevance and originality are two characteristics that define
high-quality site content. Here are some pointers on creating content
that meets these standards:

1. Relevance:

• Users should be able to easily find what your ad promises.
• Link to the page on your site that provides the most useful information
  about the product or service in your ad. For instance, direct users to
  the page where they can buy the advertised product, rather than to a
  page with a description of several products.

2. Originality:

• Feature unique content that can't be found on another site.
• Provide substantial information. If your ad does link to a page
  consisting mostly of ads or general search results (such as a directory
  or catalog page), provide additional, unique content.

• Transparency

In order to build trust with users, your site should be explicit in
three primary areas:

• The nature of your business
• How your site
  interacts with a visitor's computer
• How you intend to use a
  visitor's personal information, if you request it.

Here are tips on
maximizing your site's transparency:

1. Your business information:

• Openly share information about your business. Clearly define what your business is or does.
• Honor the deals and offers you promote in your ad.
• Deliver products and services as promised.
• Only charge users for the products and services that they order and successfully receive.
• Distinguish sponsored links from the rest of your site content.

2. Your site's interaction with a visitor's computer:

• Avoid altering users' browser behavior or settings (such as back button
  functionality or browser window size) without first getting their
  permission.
• If your site automatically installs software, be upfront about the installation and allow for easy removal.

3. Visitors' personal information:

• Unless necessary for the product or service that you're offering, don't request personal information.
• If you do request personal information, provide a privacy policy that discloses how the information will be used.
• Give options to limit the use of a user's personal information, such as the ability to opt out of receiving newsletters.
• Allow users to access your site's content without requiring them to
  register. Or, provide a preview of what users will get by registering.

• Navigability

The key to turning visitors into customers is making it easy for users to find what they're looking for. Here's how:

1. Provide a short and easy path for users to purchase or receive the product or offer in your ad.
2. Avoid excessive use of pop-ups, pop-unders, and other obtrusive elements throughout your site.
3. Make sure that your landing page loads quickly. Learn ways to improve your load time.

To improve your load time:

• Use fewer and faster redirects.
• Don't use interstitial pages.
• Compress the size of your page.
• Contact your webmaster or web hosting provider to discuss other possibilities.

Factors contributing to a slow load time

Below are common causes of a slow load time. If you don't directly
upkeep your site, you might want to pass this information along to your
webmaster.

• Multi-second meta refreshes

Redirects that use multi-second meta refreshes are a common culprit. If
you have a redirect set to occur after several seconds, change it to
zero seconds so that the redirect happens immediately.

• Slow redirects

To check the speed of your redirects, copy and paste your destination
URL into a web browser to see how long the browser spends on each
redirect URL. You can get more precise values using a tool like Fiddler

• Multiple redirects

Each redirect increases your landing page load time. If you have more than one redirect, consider eliminating unnecessary ones.

• Interstitial pages

If you employ an interstitial page (where the user waits for a few
seconds before being taken to the landing page), you should consider
removing it.

• Slow server

Your site may be hosted by a slow server. Use Google's Webmaster Tools
to see how long your site takes to fetch. If it's slow, contact your
web hosting provider.

• Large page size

If your page's HTML document is very large, try compressing it with gzip or DEFLATE.


Here are some other resources to help improve your load time (English only):

1. Use a tool like YSlow to learn why your site may be loading slowly.
2. See a list of best practices for improving your load time.
3. You can use Google's Webmaster Tools (not available in all languages)
   to graph the average download time for your site. Note, however, that
   Webmaster Tools doesn't take into account redirects or interstitial
   pages, which can affect your load time grade.

To use Google's Webmaster Tools:

• Sign in to Webmaster Tools with your Google Account login at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview.
• Click your site if you see it on the page. If not, enter your URL in the Sites field and click Add Site.
• Select Tools in the sidebar.
• Click Set crawl rate. Note that you'll need to have verified your site before you can do so.
• The third graph will show your site's average load time.

To Your Success