When you search for something on Google, you can be pretty sure that the results page will show you websites that closely match the subject you're looking for. That doesn't happen by sheer luck - it's the software Google uses when it indexes those hundreds of millions of websites.



Google is smart. They know that if they give you good, highly relevant results when you search, you'll keep coming back every time you need a search engine. Google wants to be everybody's favorite search engine.

Now before you start thinking about how nice and friendly Google is because they want searchers to have a good search experience, you should know they have a hidden motive. It's called Pay-Per-Click!

You see, if Google becomes your search engine of choice, that's where you'll do most, if not all your searching. And while searching, there's a fairly good chance that you'll click on some of the PPC ads at the right hand side of the page. And when you do click on those ads, Google makes money!

As an AdWords (Google's PPC program) advertiser, you of course want to get your clicks as cheaply as you can. But many advertisers find that the bid level keeps climbing to such high levels that it becomes difficult to make a profit.

Here's the simple way to lower the cost of your clicks - Make your keywords, your ad and your landing page relevant. Google assigns a 'quality score' to your AdWords campaign. As your quality score improves, your cost per click will decrease.

In the early days of PPC advertising, while the software was at a rudimentary stage of development, you could achieve a high display position for your PPC ad just by adjusting your bid upward. The highest bids occupied the highest positions.

It didn't take the PPC engines long to conclude that some of those ads, the ones with the higher bids, weren't very good ads, so they seldom got clicked. Having an ad that never gets clicked doesn't make money, so the PPC engines started using a combination of bid price along with click frequency to determine position.

Although linking display position to the combination of bid price and click frequency was an improvement over using only the bid price, the PPC engines evolved even further in an attempt to increase relevance of the PPC ads. Their goal is to make the top displaying PPC ads have as much relevance as the natural search results, so now, if you want lower click costs, you need to perform a mild version of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on your PPC campaigns!

Google, thru their magic software algorithms, evaluates the combination of your keywords, ad copy and landing page content in order to assign your quality score. So simply make sure that everything you're doing really is relevant.

For example, if you set up an AdWords campaign to advertise your mortgage refinancing related website and use unrelated keywords, such as 'download free music mp3', you can expect Google to slap you with an extremely high minimum bid price. I know that's an outrageous example, but you get the idea.

Work on the overall relevance of your keywords, ad copy and landing page content and you'll likely get higher display positioning at lower bid prices than most of your competitors.