You probably already have a Web site to which you want to add AdSense —
and that’s a good move. Honestly, any site that’s well designed can probably
benefit from AdSense. If you’re just building your site for the first time, you
can do a number of things to optimize your site so that you get the most from
your AdSense investment.
The next few sections walk you through some optimization strategies
designed to get your Web site working harder for you. I start out with some
site-building basics and then move pretty quickly into some AdSense-specific
recommendations.
Don’t think that all is lost just because your site exists already. Some of the
optimization strategies I cover can be tweaked in ways that let you transform
an already existing Web site into a site that gets more mileage from your
AdSense efforts. A great idea, I’d say.
Site-building basics
Site design is critical to increasing your AdSense revenue. Both Google (the
Brains Behind It All) and AdSense users (Average Janes and Joes working in
the Web trenches) have tested different combinations of content, ad placement,
and ad design to see what works best. There are some clear leaders —
site design is important, and it all starts with the site name.
Name and address, please
Okay, it’s time for the Obvious Tip of the Week: The name of your site should
be closely related to the topic of your site. There’s also more to your name
than just a name; a well-designed site has a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) —
fancy talk for a Web site address — that reflects the site name.
The URL is the address that you see in the address bar of a Web site. For
example, you don’t want a Web site named TheKittenPalace.com if your
target topic is dogs or tropical fish. If you look at Web sites, you’ll find that
the content on the site is usually closely related to the site name.
Domain names come in two flavors: free and premium (or not free). A free
domain name is usually used with Web pages that are hosted in a Web site
community, whereas a premium domain name is usually hosted all by itself.
Think of domain names like a neighborhood. An apartment in a complex at the
end of the street usually has to share the same address as several other apartments
(those in the same building), the only difference being the apartment
number. Houses, on the other hand, have the luxury of their own address.
Free domains are available from a number of sources, including
Google Pages: (www.pages.google.com): A free service you can use
when you create your Web pages with Google Page Creator.
Geocities: (http://geocities.yahoo.com): This free Web hosting
provider has been around for a while. If you don’t mind someone else
controlling the ads on your site, it’s a good option.
Homestead: (www.homestead.com): Another free hosting provider,
Homestead offers templates that make creating your Web site fast and easy.
Free WebSites: (www.freewebsites.com): This service hosts your site
for free, but requires that you allow them to advertise on your site. The
ads are small, but you don’t control them.
Most of these services provide a Web page creator tool that lets you design
your pages in minutes. You can literally sign up for an account and have a
Web site online in less than an hour, and that’s if you’re being very creative
about putting your site together.
The problem with pages like these — pages that are part of a community — is
that you don’t have a direct URL. The URL for the site — which, if you remember
my advice, should reflect the actual topic of your site — is usually something
quite generic, like http://www.yoursite.community.com.
Nothing’s wrong with being generic — if you don’t mind ending up buried in
search results — and nothing’s wrong with being buried in the search results
if you don’t want to generate income with AdSense.
Oh, and one more thing. These pages are usually free because they’re preloaded
with advertisements from which you make no money. However, that
would make it even harder for you to generate an AdSense income with these
pages.
If you do want to generate income with AdSense, your Web site address
should reflect your site name and it should be a direct address. A direct
address states http://www.yoursite.com loud and clear and nothing else. I don’t know
about you, but I’m much more likely to type that than to type http://www.
example1.com/ Search-Engine-Optimization /dp/0470175001/
ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1208363273&sr=8-10 if I’m
looking for a particular type of Web site.
Getting set up with a premium Web site that provides you with a direct
address is a little more involved. You first have to purchase a domain name,
which you can do from the following companies:
GoDaddy (www.godaddy.com): Offers regular sales on domain names.
You can also purchase your domain name, hosting, and other Web site
services through GoDaddy.
Register.com (www.register.com): Also offers domain names as well
as hosting packages and other services. You can order domain names
online through Register.com or by phone.
NameSeek (www.nameseek.com): This company strictly sells domain
names. It might even be more accurate to say this company negotiates
the sale of domain names between current owner and purchaser.
After you have a domain name in hand, build the site and upload it to the
Web. Many of the companies that sell you a domain name (or URL) will also
offer to host your Web site for a monthly or yearly fee. (Hosting is like having
land on which to put a house. You host your Web site on a server somewhere
or on your own server.) You don’t have to host with the company you purchased
the domain name from, however. Any hosting company that you’re
comfortable with will do.
I use GoDaddy.com because their pricing for domain names is good and they
offer the convenience of Web site hosting as well. However, you have plenty
of options out there. Prices vary from one company to another, and what’s
included with the domain name also varies. With some companies, you’re
purchasing the name only. With others, you might be purchasing the name
and security, the hosting, or any of a hundred or so other services.
Review each company to find the one that suits you and ask others what
company they use. Find one that you like and then stay with it. That way, if
you purchase multiple domain names, you can manage them all from one
location. (For more on Web site hosting, check out the “Selecting the right
Web host” section, later in this chapter.)
Getting with the plan
Before you register your site, put some thought into what you want the content
of the site to be. In fact, it doesn’t hurt to write a short plan for the site.
It doesn’t have to be a formal document, but getting your ideas on paper will
help flesh them out and will also help you stay on track while you’re working
through the site design and implementation. Some of the details to include in
your plan are
Site name: Remember, don’t get too cute, here. Make the name fit the site.
Topic: You do know what your site will be about, right?
Subtopics: Each of these will be a separate page or section of your site.
Hosting: On what real estate will your site sit? You can use your own
server or pay someone to host the site for you.
Design: This includes the look of the site, the navigational structure, and
even the kinds of images you want to include.
Types of content: Will your site have only text, or will you also have
video, audio, or downloads on the site?
Special considerations: Do you plan to offer products for purchase? If
so, include e-commerce capabilities.
You may think of other aspects of your site that you want to address in your
site plan. If so, by all means, add them. Write it all down in as cohesive a
format as you can and then put it away for a day or two. Come back to it after
it’s had time to season a little and re-read your plan to see if it’s still as good
an idea as you thought to start with.
Selecting the right Web host
Web sites need a place to park. Like the land your house or apartment sits
on, a Web host is the physical place on a network where the files that make
up your Web site are stored. This physical place has an address (the URL)
that makes it possible for people to find the Web site, like a street address.
somewhere can get a little complicated. How much space and bandwidth do
you need? What about things like managing the domain, security, and having
an e-mail address to go along with the domain? These are all aspects you
should consider when examining your Web site hosting options.
In most cases, a domain hosting company has several tiers of hosting packages.
The basic package usually gets you enough space on the server to
house a few dozen pages of text and light graphics. You may even be able to
slide a video or two into the mix.
From there, packages get progressively more involved until you have every
service imaginable for your Web site, from e-commerce and content management
to download capabilities and streaming audio and video. What’s right
for you is determined by your needs, and you can always start with a smaller
package and increase hosting capabilities if you find you need them at some
later date.
One thing to keep in mind when you’re selecting your Web host is the way in
which your Web site will be designed, technically speaking. If you’re writing
your site from scratch with HyperText Markup Language (HTML) or some
other programming language, you have less to worry about. But if you’re
using an HTML editing program (like FrontPage or DreamWeaver) to design
your Web site, you may need to have special extensions installed on your
site to allow file transfers from your computer to the server. These additional
extensions usually add a few dollars extra to the cost of the hosting package.
Knowing what you need before you get started could save you a few headaches
and maybe even a little money.
Smart site design
After you come up with a name for your site and figure out where it’ll be
hosted, it’s time to begin actually designing your Web site. You can deploy a
few strategies that will make it easier to optimize your Web site for AdSense
purposes.
First and foremost, keep in mind that the layout of your site will dramatically
affect how your AdSense ads perform. This ain’t rocket science, by the way. All
you really have to do is picture what most people do when they surf the Web.
In general, a user nearly always uses a Web site in the same fashion. When a
user clicks into your site, his eyes first take in the heading of the page, travel
down the right side of the page, and finally move to the middle. The exception
to the normal state of affairs is when there’s something flashy in the middle of
the page that catches the visitor’s eye first. The left side of the page is where
most Web sites include the navigational structure, so users are less inclined to
look there until they’re ready to move on to another page on the site.
In Web site design, flashy isn’t usually a good thing. Neither is Flash-y. Flash is
a Web design protocol that animates objects and allows designers to embed
video into a Web page. The problem with Flash is that it tends to hog a lot of
resources, so it slows users’ computer performance down, which users hate.
The fastest way to lose visitors is to bog their systems down with your Flash
(or flash). Make your pages attractive, but also make it possible for those
pages to load quickly even with (gasp) dialup service.
Because visitors nearly always approach a Web site in the same way, many
designers have discovered that the most important information on a Web site
should go in certain places. That’s why you often see that Web sites have a
navigation bar on the left side of the page. Some sites include text links at the
top of the page, and the most important content on the page is nearly always
above the fold.
Above the fold is a newspaper term used to designate the placement of the
most important story in the day’s news. Newspapers are folded about halfway
down the page. When a reader picks up the paper, she always turns it so the
title of the paper is on top. (This is human nature; we don’t like things displayed
upside down.) So, the most important story of the day gets in the top
half of the page, above the fold.
The same term can be used to relate to Web sites as well, though the orientation
is a bit different. Because no fold is on a Web page, you have to think
in terms of a browser window. Essentially, the fold on a Web page lines up
with the bottom edge of your browser before the page has been scrolled.
(Scrolling a page involves using the page’s scroll bars to move the page up
and down so you can view content that’s not visible when the page appears
in your browser window.)
illustrates where the fold is on the page. The figure also includes
labeling for other important elements of the page.
A site visitor clicks your page and, in many cases, makes a determination
about the value of the page before he ever scrolls down or moves the page in
any way. Essentially, you have only one shot to make a good first impression:
Whatever a visitor sees when that browser window loads is, for all intents
and purposes, what he gets. So, the most important elements of your site
should be loaded into that area above the fold. Information that’s not quite as
important should be placed below the fold.
For your AdSense strategy, this means placing ads smack dab in those sections
of your site where a visitor’s eye is most likely to land, which are
At or near the top of the page (either immediately above or immediately
below the title of the site, depending on how well the ads integrate
in that spot)
Above the content, or at the least, imbedded in the content above the
fold
On the right side of the page, blended with the other content that usually
appears in the sidebar
On the left side and the bottom of a page (only effective when the ads
blend well with the other elements of those sections)
one of the most popular (and most effective) ad layouts.
While you’re designing your pages, keep in mind that the areas shown in
are most desirable for ad placement. That doesn’t mean that ads
should dominate those sections or that ads can’t be effective anywhere else.
It only means those sections are optimal for ads. Also, ads should be integrated
into the content in those sections without being overpowering, and
they should logically fit with your Web site design.
AdSense optimized content
I spend a lot of time in this chapter talking about ad placement for a simple
reason — it’s important. If nobody sees your AdSense ad, it’d be like the
proverbial tree falling in the middle of the forest — no moneymaking proposition,
in other words.
With the ad placement basics out of the way, it’s time to figure out how to
convince the good folks at Google AdSense to place ads on your Web site
that have meaning to your site visitors. Your ultimate goal by implementing
AdSense is to entice visitors to click or view the ads that appear on your
page. That only happens, though, if the ads are appealing to visitors. Having
the right content is the key to having the right ads.
The technology behind Google AdSense — Web crawlers, spyders, and bots
diligently scouring the World Wide Web for info — tries its best to determine
the content of your site, but it ain’t perfect. If all the articles on one page
refer to grading diamonds and other gemstones, the ads that are pushed to
your page for display will (more likely than not) feature loose diamonds and
gemstones or diamond and gemstone jewelry. (Duh!) If you have a thing for
free association so that articles on any given page jump from one topic to
another with no cohesion, AdSense will have a much harder time placing relevant
ads on your page. You could end up with ads for frog food when your
site is related to planning a wedding at the lake. Try to keep your page as
cohesive as possible and don’t combine topics on a page if you can help it.
Google uses the same technology to index your pages for search results that
it uses to examine your pages to determine the most relevant ads. To improve
ad targeting for your site, you can do some things that are designed to pique
the interest of the Google indexers, like using keywords in your content and in
the design of your site.
Piquing the interest of Google indexers has become a science in its own
right — the science of search engine optimization. SEO, as it is referred to
by those in the know, has tried to come up with a set of Web design principles
that deal with everything from choosing content to actual structure to
help search engines more easily analyze your site to determine where in the
search results it fits best.
One of the most basic elements of SEO is how the content on your site is
formatted. Assuming your content is mostly text, the titles and headings of
your text are important. Including keywords — words that indicate the topic
of your site — in titles and headings as well as a few times in the text of the
articles you’re using, is one way to ensure that a search engine crawler will
properly classify your site
The most important principle behind SEO involves making sure that you
design your Web site so that it’s both useful and relevant to visitors. Site visitors
will come to your site either by conducting a search for a specific topic
or by directly typing your Web address into the address bar of their browser.
If you design your Web site with the intent of providing something the visitor
needs, search crawlers are more likely to classify your site properly. As an
added bonus, you’ll probably also end up ranking higher in the search results.
I have lots more on SEO in Chapter 4, but for now, the most you need to know
is that if you apply the same techniques that you would to optimizing your
Web site for search engines, your AdSense ads will be spot on.
, you can see how content can be placed around AdSense ad
units to provide users with what they need and to feed the Google crawler so
that ads are properly targeted.
You may say it’s just not enough to be told that the Google crawler knows
its stuff when it comes to pushing content-specific ads to your site. It may
not even be the content that you’re worried about. The big questions for you
might be “Where will the ad lead?” or “How will it look after you put it on your
site?” Sometimes you just want to see for yourself, and that’s fine. Just don’t
make the mistake of clicking your own ads. Instead, use the AdSense preview
tool to see what kind of ads will be returned for your site. (You can download
the preview tool at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/
answer.py?answer=10005&topic=160.) When you find the file, follow
these steps to download and install it:
1. Right-click the AdSense preview tool filename.
2. In the menu that appears, select Save and then save the file to your
desktop.
3. When the download is complete, double-click the file to open it.
4. In the confirmation dialog box that appears
5. When the Successful Install confirmation message appears, click OK.
6. Open Internet Explorer and navigate to the site whose ads you want to
preview.
Sorry, this doesn’t work with Firefox or other browsers.
7. Right-click inside the page but not inside the ad unit.
8. In the menu that appears, select Google AdSense Preview Tool, A list of the ads showing on your site appears.
9. Click the link for each ad to be taken to the advertisers’ Web sites, or
place a check mark in the check box beside each ad and click Show
Selected URLs to see the Web addresses the ads lead to.
Section targeting
In AdSense terminology, section targeting is a method of ad placement that
allows advertisers to decide where on a page they want their ads displayed. If
it turns out that you have ad space available in that place on the page, and if
your page is related to the topic of the ad, the ad can be placed on your site.
(I use can be because you probably won’t be the only publisher that meets
the requirements the advertiser sets forth, and the ad can be placed on any
site that meets said requirements.)
Ads rotate, so an ad may appear on your site one day and not the next.
Advertisers’ budgets also vary, and that’s another determining factor on
where and how often you may see the ad.
You’ll encounter two types of section targeting:
Contextual: Uses such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font
size, and the overall link structure of the Web site to determine what a
Web page is about and to precisely match ads to each page.
Placement: Advertisers choose specific ad placements — sections of
specific Web sites they’ve take a shine to — on which to run their ads.
Ads that are placement-targeted may not exactly jive with the content of
your page, but they’re hand-picked by advertisers who believe there’s
a match between what your users are interested in and what the advertiser
is advertising. For the privilege of making these specific choices,
the advertiser pays a slightly higher fee. As a publisher, you benefit
because you’ll be paid every time someone comes to your site and sees
the ad rather than by the number of times the ad is clicked.
Using RSS feeds for content
Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a way of delivering news stories, articles,
blog entries, and other types of content to subscribers by way of an e-mail or
a content aggregator — a program that collects RSS feeds and delivers them
all to a single location.
Think of RSS like a newspaper delivered to your home. You don’t have to
go out to get every single story in a newspaper. You subscribe to the paper,
the reporters do all the legwork, the publisher puts all their stories together
in one package, and a delivery guy brings it right to your front door. An RSS
feed is an electronic version of a newspaper.
The most important aspect of RSS feeds is that they deliver fresh content as
often as it’s available. If you’re trying to put fresh content on your Web site
to improve your AdSense revenues, that’s huge. It’s more content, less work,
and Google loves it.
Wait. I can hear your objection. It’s not plagiarism or copyright infringement.
Content owners who put their content out via RSS feeds want that content to
be distributed to as many readers as possible. You still need to ensure that
the content is attributed properly, but as long as you do, you should have no
problem using RSS feeds to add content to your Web site.
You do have to consider a couple logistical problems when using RSS,
though. One problem is that RSS feeds don’t always deliver full articles. The
content owner — the person or company that publishes the article, news
story, blog, or other type of content — can set how much of his content he
wants delivered through the RSS feed. That means you may only get about
250 characters delivered (which is usually about a paragraph). Some RSS
feeds (the Google Reader, for example) link the titles of feeds to a pop-up
window. When you click the title, the window pops up for you to read the
feed. Because the bots and spyders Google uses won’t be doing that clicking,
they probably can’t associate the RSS content with your Web site.
The way feeds are displayed varies from reader to reader. What’s more, the
feed display (or a feed reader) isn’t likely to be customizable, adding yet
another wrinkle to your plan to let someone else do all the hard work.
If you’ve embedded an RSS feed on your Web site to help generate fresh, new
content, having only 250 words of an article can be a real problem because
it’s hard to place relevant AdSense ads around that content. Even when the
full article is available, feed readers often interfere with AdSense displays,
making it difficult, if not impossible, to use RSS for content for your Web site.
Back to the drawing board, right? Nope, not yet.
One way to get around those display issues is to use an RSS script that allows
you to add the feed to your site and to change the way it’s displayed. RSS
scripts, such as the RSS Equalizer (http://milleniumb.rssalizer.
hop.clickbank.net), CaRP (www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp), and
FeedForAll.com’s PHP script (www.feedforall.com/free-php-script.
htm), make it possible for you to grab RSS content and display it more effectively
on your Web site. For example, if the script converts your RSS feeds to
HTML, you can add articles to your site without ever even logging on. And
best of all, you can also place AdSense ads around and within those articles.
So now you not only have automatically updated content, but you also have
content with AdSense ads. Life’s good!
A word about “baiting”
If you’ve read a bit about Web marketing here and there, you may have come
across link baiting. Link baiting is the creation of an article that’s so unique
or interesting that people, because of its content, want to link to it. Link baiting
can be a good tactic for driving content to your site, which of course, will
drive up your AdSense revenues. But to be successful, you have to make your
link bait fun, informative, or creative — and it still has to be quality content.
The link bait has a dark side, too. When content is gimmicky, misleading, and
unrelated to the content of your Web site, it can get you into trouble with
Google. For example, if you place a gadget on a page of your site with the specific
intent of drawing users to your site, and that gadget isn’t directly related
to the site’s content, you’re skirting on the dark side of link baiting. Users
may come to download that gadget, but they’ll be disgusted that your site
isn’t relevant to their real interests, so they’ll go somewhere else.
After a while, even Google’s crawlers will realize that the increase in traffic to
your site is only superficial. After they do, your ranking in search results will
be penalized and your site traffic will drop dramatically. Misleading link baiting
is expressly forbidden by Google, and because it’s become such a popular
way to drive Web site traffic, Google has developed some new ways to judge
whether you’re using link baiting tactics.
Nothing’s wrong with adding a bit of fun or creative content to your site, just
make sure you create it within the guidelines that Google has established.
(Need a refresher on Google’s guidelines? You’re in luck. That section is
coming up right . . . now!)
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