There’s a significant amount of overlap between search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization, one of the most important components of an SEM campaign is search engine optimization (or SEO), “the process of editing a web site’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines.” This is especially true when it comes to your landing pages - the same things that will make your pages appear at the top of Google’s organic results will lead to a higher AdWords Quality Score (even if they’re “orphaned” landing pages that you don’t link to from your site.) 

As we’ve explained before, the most important factor in your Quality Score is the alignment between your keywords, your ads, and your landing pages. You know what your keywords are, and your ads can’t be any longer than 95 characters each, but what exactly do we mean by “landing page content”? What we don’t mean is every word on your page: some content is more important than other content.

Here are three SEO best practices you should always apply to your SEM landing pages:

Don’t Put Text In Images
In order for the content on your landing pages to be factored into your Quality Score, it needs to be readable by a search network’s crawlers. Text is crawlable, but images are not. The content in your headlines is probably the most important and keyword-rich content on your landing pages. If it’s rendered in an image, search engines won’t be able to read it.
Because image ALT tags have been abused in the past (for instance, by users cramming clear 1x1 pixel images full of keywords) search engines either ignore them completely or assign them an extremely low value when determining relevance. If you want search engines to know what’s in your banners, it has to be text.

Put Your Most Important Content Into An <h1> Tag
There’s some controversy over how important <h1> tags really, but they are important nevertheless. Therefore, you should include your headline text in your <h1> tag. Search networks will find this information, and it will be an important factor in determining the relevance of your landing pages.

Include Keywords In Your <META> Tags
There are three types of <META> tags you should include on your landing page: a Title tag, a Description tag and a Keyword tag:

• Title tag: This is the content that appears at the top of a user’s browser window. You’ll want to include keywords, but be sure to write something that is readable and informative for your users. (A post by Jono Craig that we found particularly helpful suggests a limit of 90 characters with spaces.)
• Description tag: This tag is similar to the title tag - both should include summaries of the content on your pages, but the description tag can be about twice as long. (Craig suggests a limit of 170 characters with spaces here.) Here as elsewhere, be sure not to repeat terms.
• Keyword tag: You don’t want to include all of your keywords in this field; stick to a total of about 10 terms. If you’re having a hard time deciding which keywords to include, stick with the terms that drive the most traffic to that particular landing page. (The suggested character limit here is 900 characters with spaces.)

Hanny, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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