Landing Page Quality Scoring
Summary: Your website link(s) in your article’s resource box MUST provide our users with perceived value when they land on your website…and we intend to figure out how to quantify/qualify whether your URL adds value or turns off our visitors as part of our obsession with wanting to improve our users’ experience.
Today more than ever, we live in an “ad-scoring” world where publishers not only want quality advertisers, but they are concerned with the quality of the landing page once one of their users clicks on the ad, that the experience is positive.
How does this apply to EzineArticles and our expert authors? When our website visitors come to us because they trust us to provide them with a (5) star quality experience, we look bad if they click on the website in the resource box to a (1) star website experience or worse, broken/dead link. Therefore the more relevant your website is to the content in your article, the higher the relevancy and perceived value will be to our user who is leaving our home to visit yours.
Here are (7) initial guidelines on what a 5 star vs. 1 star website landing page looks like:
- Does your website provide related / relevant value to what your article topic was about? ie: If your article was about “corporate sales training tips”, will the user find more of the same on your website or will they find completely unrelated content that confuses them as to what your real area of expertise is?
- Is your website up? If you have dead or broken links in your article resource box right now, your landing page quality score is ZERO.
- Has your website been updated in the last 6 months? Stale content is boring and less valuable.
- Does your website provide contact information? If you don’t want to be personally found, your website quality score is lower than those who provide multiple ways to be contacted (email, contact-us form, telephone, skype, fax, Instant Messaging, etc). Your website is more valuable to our users if you openly share information about your business.
- Squeeze pages can be perceived as evil by some users. If the only way you’ll cough up more value to our user when they visit your website is by them having to cough up their email address, your website is less valuable than one that offers both (the free information or an opt-in way to get additional information). I’m not saying squeeze pages are evil, but they can be a turn-off to a visitor who doesn’t trust you enough yet to give you their private email address. Try to give your web visitors an option to receive value without being forced to register with you.
- Does your website have pop ups, no privacy guarantees, and no delineation between your content and ads? First, we already don’t accept links that force a pop up, but websites that intend to deceive will score lower than those that offer more transparency behind their intentions. Make sure you don’t try to hold your web visitor hostage by over-controlling the exit click or disabling the back button (now that’s evil).
- Do you honor your deals and do as you promised on your website? You’d be surprised how many folks report to us when they have a bad experience with a particular author.
Before we make our website landing page scoring part of the EzineArticles article review process, we’d like to hear from you.
What changes to the above (7) should we make, add or delete?
Hi, i notice that when I write an article on marketing, I get a pick up in my regular article category which is spiritual. I don’t know why this happens.
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