For a moment, I’d like for you to reflect on your experience of driving along the freeway.  Have you ever seen a new billboard, but before you could understand what it was, you were past it? 

Your web site home page, and other landing pages, aren’t so different.  The visitor’s mouse hovers over the ‘back button’, just waiting for a reason to click.  So, your goal is to provide a reason for the visitor to stick around and delve deeper into your site.

One of the problems with many homepages is the sheer amount of everything.  Ideally, viewing your entire homepage wouldn’t require any scrolling.  In addition, in a split second it should be pretty clear what you offer, and to whom you offer it (remember the billboard drive-by).  There should also be a few very specific places to click next.  Any extraneous information is likely to be a distraction.

 
To-do list:

• Identify any information that really doesn’t need to be there (your goal is to reduce the overall page length to eliminate scrolling).
• Reduce the overall number of possible links, and make sure that the main items visitors are looking for are more visually prominent than other navigation options.
• Replace any detailed text with a ‘positioning statement’ that describes your main value in less than 25 words.  Use effective graphic design to make this positioning statement stand out.

I called Google this week with a question about Quality Score.  I had a keyword with 1 impression, 1 click, and 1 conversion, but it had a LOW quality score.  My previous understanding was that CTR (in this case 100%) was the biggest influencing factor on adwords quality, but it seems not.

Google Support reviewed the keyword and told me that because the word was not present in the ad, it was being awared a low quality score.  The ad was relevant to the keyword, even though the keyword itself wasn’t in the ad text - causing a lower QS.

This reinforces the case for very small adgroups, with only a few highly relevant keywords that can be featured in the ad.