Back in the early days of paid search advertising, traditional marketers celebrated the fact that they could finally buy placement on search engine results pages for a flat price. Traditional search engine optimizers sometimes scoffed at those who couldn't (or wouldn't) learn the rules of building a relevant web page. Time, and a variety of paid search system upgrades, have forced both sides to meet in the middle. These days you need to know how to manage both bid prices and relevancy targeting and Search Engine Journal's David Davis is happy to tell you how.

In a wonderful blog post filled with plenty of screen shots and real life examples, David explains how to make use of Google's own tools to better determine the quality score of your ads and landing pages.

He explains:

There are two very useful and free tools at our disposal when troubleshooting landing page quality scores. These are the W3 Semantic Extractor and the Google site related keyword tool. What better way to get information about what Google thinks your site is about then using a tool designed by Google to figure out exactly what your site is about?

He goes on to show two real life examples of pages with paid search ads that he ran through this system. By using Google's site related keyword tool, he's able to identify contextual changes that need to be made to a landing page to increase the quality score. By using the W3 Semantic Extractor, he's able to look at how a page is laid out semantically and can offer up some useful tips on how to restructure content.

For instance:

The great thing about David's advice is that it will not only help your quality score (which will lower your average cost per click), it will also increase the relevancy of your page. That should equal stronger conversion rates.

Hmm...lower cost per click with the potential for more sales? Sounds like a worthwhile thing to try to me.