I’ll have you know, that “a weekly new blog post” is now officially part of my working schedule. It’s etched in on Friday’s 8-10 pm…so if you don’t’ see a new post by Saturday morning, I’m expecting some hate mail!This week I tore apart & restructured my work week, making sure to finally start using the calendar features of MS Outlook. Outlook, Gmail Calendars, and my Ipod Touch are now all in full sync in a very diligent effort to become more organized and become a better business person.

But since its been over a month between new posts, I thought I’d show ya’ll a cool trick I came across the other day. So without further adieu, check this out…

Let’s pretend for a minute that you’re promoting a piece of software. You’re browsing around over at RegNow, and you find an ipod converter software that you’d like to promote.

So you get your campaign all setup, get your analytics in place (I highly recommend GetClicky over Google Analytics), and go live.

After a few weeks while looking at your GetClicky stats, you notice a lot of searches for “ipod converter mac, ipod converter osx, ipod converter software for macintosh”. You dig further and find that 15% of all your traffic is coming from Macintosh computers using the Safari web browser.

But shit…you’ve just realized that you’re sending all of your PPC traffic to a Windows version of the software, most likely hurting potential conversions, and costing you a bundle for poorly targeted traffic.

Now, to remedy this problem you could either:
1) Create a new adgroup with “Mac” specific keywords, ads, and a new destination URL promoting the Mac version of the software, or…

2) Use some simple javascript to send all “Mac Users” to a Mac specific landing page promoting the Mac version of the software.

Huh?

Yeah…forget trying to come up with every variation of “ipod converter” a Mac user might search with. Instead, send them to a landing page of your choosing simple by targeting their browser’s user agent.

Here’s what you need to do to test this (even if you don’t own a Mac):

1) Download and install the User Agent Switcher Plugin for Firefox

User Agent Switcher

2) Import this XML file into the User Agent

3) Add this javascript before the </head> tag of your landing page:

<script language=javascript>
<!–
if((navigator.userAgent.match(/Macintosh/i)))
{
location.replace(“ipod-converter-mac.php?s=ipod converter for the Mac”);
}
–>
4) Optional: Add dynamic Speed PPC tokens to your landing page to customize a message to your Macintosh visitors.

<?php
$seed = $_GET['s'];
$seed = ucwords(strtolower($seed));
$expansion = $_GET['e'];
$expansion = ucwords(strtolower($expansion));
$final = $_GET['f'];
$final = ucwords(strtolower($final));
$keyword = $_GET['t202kw'];
if ($_GET['OVKEY']) { $keyword = $_GET['OVKEY']; }
$keyword = ucwords(strtolower($keyword));
?>

On your Mac specific lander, echo back a custom message like:
Are you look for an <strong><? echo $seed; ?></strong>?

This would show on the page as:  “Are you looking for an ipod converter for the Mac?”

5) Using the User Agent addon, switch your browser to a Mac/Safari or Mac/Firefox setting, then test to see if it works. You can also watch your own clicks from the Spy View of GetClicky or Tracking202 Pro. You should see your own IP address display as a Macintosh computer. You can also test as if you were using a different browser.

If you’ve paid close attention and properly followed all the steps as outlined, any Mac visitor to your entrance PPC landing page will immediately be redirected to your Mac specific lander, where you have custom tailored your page copy and affiliate promotion to your Mac audience.

This quick little addition to your landing pages could mean an extra couple hundred, thousand, or perhaps more in affiliate commissions each month. While before you were just losing your Macintosh visitors to your competition…you’re now leaving much less money on the table, while increasing your conversion rate  and hopefully, your ROI.

This tactic works well with mobile Iphone/Ipod traffic as well. If you want your mobile Iphone users to see a landing page you’ve specifically created and designed for the small 480 x 320 viewing space, all you do is:

<—Iphone—–>

<script language=javascript>
<!–
if((navigator.userAgent.match(/iPhone/i)) || (navigator.userAgent.match(/iPod/i)))
{
location.replace(“REDIRECT LINK HERE”);
}
–>
</script>

Pretty simple stuff eh?

Try it out and let me know what you think. Did it increase conversions? Leave your comments below.

And remember…weekly posts, so if I lag and drag my feet…be sure to ping me!

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If you have a quick read of a post I did back in August called “Content Stuffing Your Landing Pages…“, you’ll learn how to hide content with hidden div tags and css stylings.

Taking that same process a step further, you could do exactly the same thing and hide navigational menus that will help the Google bot spider your site, but at the same time, not give unnecessary links to follow for your real visitors.

Google wants to see links to a terms of service, page contact us, privacy policy. Also, having an xml sitemap, links to other internal pages such, and a few outgoing links to high quality resource sites can all improve your quality score. But depending upon the style of landing page you use, these links can be unsightly and lead to visitor “leakage”.

My typical landing page structure includes as many external calls to to php files as possible. This makes it easy to have a central location from which to update code on multiple pages. For example, lets say my navigational menu across all pages looks like this:

Home | About Us | Contact | Disclaimer | Privacy Policy | Terms of Service | Sitemap | Wikipedia Link | Resource Page

If I included the html code for this structure on each of my landing pages on my site, it could be quite cumbersome if I need to change a link (for example the Wiki article), not to mention prone to error. If I had 15 landing pages, I’d have to edit 15 html files individually to change a single link. Instead, I can put the same code into a file called “navmenu.php”. Then when I wanted to use it on my site, I’d call it:

<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>

And when I want the bots to see my nav menu, but hide it from my real visitors, I’d create a div tag called “navigation”, set its attributes in my external css file to hide the content:

<div id=”navigation”>
<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>

Inside style.css:

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

A search engine bot that comes to your site first reads your opening document type and html tags. It then reads code left to right. So what I like to do is include a call to a navigational menu right near the top of my landing page.

So after my closing </head> tag, I’d have my opening <body> tag, then sometimes a wrapper. Then I’d have my header div, in which I would create my navigational div and call my navigation menu:

<body>
<div id=”wrapper”>
<div id=”header”>
<div id=”navigation”>
<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>
</div>

By calling the navigational menu in the header, this will be some of the first code the bot sees upon visiting your site and can quickly spider the rest of your links. (make you’re all your links work, or your quality score may suffer)

I’ll then have the rest of my content in a content div <div id=”content”>, and finally include a footer div, with yet again another call to my navigtational menu:

<div id=”footer>
<div id=”navigation”>
<?php include_once(”http://yourdomain.com/inc/navmenu.php”) ?>
</div>
</div>

So the bot visits my site, spiders my “required pages” via my hidden navigation in the header, as well as in the footer. From my experimentation with this, I’ve seen improved quality score and time in which my pages get indexed. As an added step to help Google spider my site quickly, once I create an XML sitemap, I’ll manually submit it to Google’s sitemap submission service.

Since the code posted above may not make perfect sense scattered throughout the post, I’ve included a sample landing page that you can use as a template and modify:

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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 <strong>distance education</strong>. 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 </body> tag, call the article using the following code:

<?php include_once(“http://www.domain.com/data/article.php”) ?>

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:

<?php include_once(“http://masterlesssamurai.com/data/distance-education.php”) ?>

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 </head> section of your document:

<link href=”http://yourdomain.com/style.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

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:<div class=”img”> </div> around the code. The end result should look something like this:

<div class=”img”><?php include_once(“http://masterlesssamurai.com/data/distance-education.php”) ?></div>

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.

Try it out and let me know how it works. If you have any questions regarding this tactic, feel free to contact me. Also, I love getting feedback, so be sure to comment below and rate this post.

Way of the Warrior – Tip of the Day: To master the art of creating quality landing pages,  you must master basic HTML & CSS skills. For high quality interactive web design training, I highly recommend you check out Lynda.com. At $25 / mo, the content you gain access to is a steal as you can quickly master an array of topics that will help you with your online business ventures.

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