Google Adsense isn’t a “get rich overnight” scheme, it’s not a “do nothing earn alot moneymaker”, but it can bring you a nice income if you want. Follow these Adsense tips to increase your Adsense succes!
Nr 1. Keywords
Your keywords are very important. Not just for the payout of the ads, but also for your ranking in the search results.
Good keywords means higher rankings, higher rankings means more visitors, more visitors means more clickability.
As said above, keywords are also important for the payout of the ads. Use your keywords to get ads that have high payout rates. For instance: if your site is all about ringtones, and you have your keywords working for that, the payout rates are not going to be very high, since ringtones are not a high income item (per piece that is). On the contrary, if your site is about asbestos for instance, this will generate high payout ads.
There are a few sites out there on the web that can help you find the right keywords for your site. A good way of working is to go to a Keyword Density Analyzer (SEO Density Analyzer from www.seochat.com or the Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer from www.ranks.nl). Put your selection of the most important keywords in a textfile on your computer (sitename_keywords.txt), and save it.
Then, go to the Overture Search Inventory or the Google Keyword Tool, enter your existing keywords from your file (sitename_keywords.txt), and press the button. Both keyword tools will give you a list of related keywords, and their popularity. Save these newfound to another file (sitename_keyword_suggestions.txt), and use this file to write new content with high hit rate for your website. The Google Keyword Tool also offers you the functionality of a Keyword Density Analyzer (like SEO Density Analyzer from www.seochat.com or the Keyword Density & Prominence Analyzer from www.ranks.nl), and above that, it also offers you the possibility to check the estimated payouts, after all, the cash payout is what we are trying to improve here. For those intrested: Google is using the technology of Urchin, which they aquired somewhere in 2005.
As for the Overture Analysis tool, it is said that you would get more keyword analysis tools when you use their Searchmarketing (which is basically the same as the Google adwords campaign, but then for Yahoo).
Nr 2. Write many informative, high quality, niche pages
The first part of the secret of this success quite is simple: the more pages you have, the more AdSense banners you can put up, and the more visitors you can gain, and the more returning visitors you can gain (due to the changing content).
The second part is the informative and high quality part. Quite simple again, make sure your webpages have some added value, they bring some new information to the reader. Do not copy pages from other sites. Google will recognize them as being a copy, and this will eventually lead to fewer visitors. Make sure your pages are of high quality, meaning that they have to be nice and readable. Use a good writing language, and make sure there are no grammatical, syntactical or spelling errors in your text. If you have the chance, have your website translated to French and German, since more languages means more visitors. You can find some good and cheap translators on freelancer websites such as www.getafreelancer.com or www.rentacoder.com. Or you can hire me if it is an English <-> Dutch translation. The high quality of the pages is both for the page itself, and for the text. Make your pages in a pleasing format, not overthrown with colorful flashing banner and pop-ups and pop-unders and more like that.
The last part is write niche pages. Don’t write pages that you can find everywhere on the net. Try to find keywords that have high payout rates, that are searched on alot, but that do not have alot of hit pages. Get good in those subjects, and write informative pages about that. But, don’t move away from the subject of your website. If necessary, create a new website for the new subject.
Nr 3. Don’t overuse CSS
Using CSS is good. Using CSS is great. Using CSS really enhances the looks of your websites. But overdoing CSS can damage the relevance of your ads, and thus the high payout rate of your ads.
The reason for this is that Google AdSense is not only reading your text, but also your html, and it uses several tags to see which keywords are most important on your website. Different tags get different ratings in the Google AdSense Brain, <H1> is one of the more important, but also <H3>, <B> and <I> are used to find out the most important keywords in your site, and be able to post the most relevant ads. No need to say that if you use CSS to format these parts of text differently, the Google spider will not be able to make a difference between the different keywords.
Nr 4. Don’t put Google AdSense on an empty page
There is no use of putting AdSense ads on an empty page, or a page filled with “Lorem Ipsum” or other placeholder text. This is because of the way the AdSense system works. The first time some user gets to your new page, AdSense will try to find in its database what your site is all about, to make sure it can provide you with matching ads. It will find nothing in its database of course, since this is a brand new page. Then it will ask the Google Spider to come and take a look at this page, and index it. The spider will come, and index your page as dealing with “Lorem Ipsum”, “Blah”, “YaddaYadda”, or even nothing at all. The next visitor will get to see some AdSense ads, but since the page is about nothing, the ads will be too, and same for the payout rate. Not a problem you say, when your content arives in your page, so will the relevant ads. Yes, indeed, but this can take a few weeks, since the Google Spider doesn’t visit you that often (3 to 6 weeks).
Nr 5. Use Channels
Using your Google Adsense homepage, create channels, and use them to follow up on the popularity (Adsense wise that is) of the banners on your different pages. Give them descriptive names, so that you know which banner earned you which money. Use this information to tweak your pages, your banners, your placement, and your bannercolors.
For instance: give your channels names such as:
- IndexPageTopBannerLeatherBoardGraphite
- PicturePageLowLinkBlockLargeRed
- BlogIndexSkyScraperYellowNoBorder
If you use channels this way, Google offers you great ways of following up on the performance of your different pages. This way you can follow-up on the CTR of your different ads, and use the techniques described here in this article to increase that number.
Naturally, if you are already an AdSense publisher, you are now asking yourself, what a good CTR is. Well, for a forum, a CTR of around 0.02-0.08, a blog is mostly around 2-5%, and a content-page generally goes towards the 3-8%. If your CTR goes over 10%, I think we can say your AdSense campaign is quite successful.
The CTR of your page is mostly dictated by these four items:
- The position of the ad on your site
- The color of the ad
- The content you offer
- The type of visitors you have
The first two of these are discussed in the next chapters of this article. As for the third item, good content makes the search engine spider love your page, index it higher, and visit more often. Plus, of course, and more important, it will make your visitors like your page, bookmark it, and come back to it. Besides, a happy visitor is a clicker-happy visitor.
As for the last item, having alot of visitors from autosurf programs is really useless. It lowers your CTR, and most of these visitors never glance at your site.
Nr 6. Positioning your ads
Positioning your ads is very important. Not that surprising I assume, as it seems rather logical that placing your Google ads in the lowest rightest corner where people deliberately will have to scroll to will not earn you alot of clicks. Google itself has checked out which the best places are to place your ads, and put it in their famous heat map.
They gathered all their stats, and figured out that, when all other things remain equal, the placement of the ads gave this performance map. The color varies from dark orange (strongest performance) to soft yellow (weakest performance).
Besides the Google heat map, also take into account that ads above the fold line (the fold line is the lowest line you can see on your screen without scrolling) generally perform better. Same goes for ads placed near images, or ads placed near control items (menus). Do know that it is agains Google’s regulation to place images in the ads, or next the ads in such a way that the visitor may be confused over the link between the images and the ads, or that you draw him to click your ads (meaning no pointing fingers, arrows, …).
For forums there are several good places, namely right above the block of threads, right beneath the block of threads, or right above or beneath the first thread.
In this item again comes in the previous AdSense tip: use channel. Indeed, use channels, and name them well, so that you know which spots work best on your website. Follow up very well on the results, experiment alot, and use your knowledge well to make the most out of your website.
Nr 7. Colors of your ads
Another important thing: the colors of your AdSense ad. There are different opinions on this topic. Some people say that blending in your AdSense ads with the rest of the page gives the best results. Some people say the contrary, making them in totally different colors, and with borders will attract more clicks to your ads. Blending the ads into your webpage means using the same style, use the same background color for the ads as the background of your webpage, make the text color the same as the text color of your web page, and do not use a border (not using a border is done by setting the color of the border to the same color as the background of the ad and of your webpage). Blending them in surely has the nicest effect on your pages, it doesn’t really mess up the overal look of your website, and seems to be less annoying for your website visitors.
Again here the rule comes in: use channels, use good names for your channels, and experiment alot.