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AdWords Quality Score Basics

In my opinion quality score is a real pain, however, it's not necessarily a bad thing once you understand it. The main reason is that its not completely obvious to trick -- so most people won't manage to trick it -- they'll lose money and quit. That means that whoever manages to understand it will make much more profit than if it was simple and with a lot of competitors.
The first thing to understand is that there are several quality score phases:
Phase 1: The AdBot visits your site, and assigns you a quality score based on:

The content of your site (Landing Page)
Your advert (Keyword Relevance)
The time to load your page
How much you bid for that keyword - This one is not declared by Google, but we discuss it in this post: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/dont-be-a-miser-with-adwords-or-at-least-dont-show-it/

Phase 2: Actual performance on your advert (CTR)
Let's start with Phase 1:
What you need to do is:

Ensure that you have a decent server and the page doesn't take forever to load (this could be more of an issue with pages that are generated on the fly rather than a slow server by itself - even if I never had any issues with this and I was never penalized by Google because of this even when my pages were dynamic and took a few seconds to load).
Use the exact keyword you are bidding for twice in your advert, once on line 1 (The title) and once either on line 2 or 3 (the 2 description lines).
If you do this and you bid the right amount -- read: http://www.ppchacking.com/2009/02/dont-be-a-miser-with-adwords-or-at-least-dont-show-it/ -- then the initial quality score you'll get will be about the content of your site -- something we'll see on the next post.

In the next post we'll see the more advanced things related to site content and also Phase 2.

Giotto De Filippi is an expert consultant with both Adwords and SEO. He writes on his blog PPCHACKING.COM giving advanced tricks about how to get better results with Adwords. A lot of emphasis is put on the Quality Score technology Adwords uses. He has 10 years Internet Marketing experience and has worked both for very large corporate clients and small to medium business - consistently achieving noticeable improvements for his customers.