5.1 Attracting Relevant Ads

Getting the color and placement right will help improve your click-throughrate. But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves.

In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get tochoose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do stopirrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash.The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click andyou’ll earn money.

The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’srobot will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and thecontent on your page.

Bear in mind that Google’s robot can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty muchanything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in chapter 8 but fornow, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got tohave the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you theads you want.

5.2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant

How exactly Google’s robot reads pages is a secret guarded about as closelyas Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have aneffect though is the title of your URLs and files.

When you create your pages and view them on your computer beforeuploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up adsrelated to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a prettybig clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name ofthe directory.

Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important. The name of the file plays a big part too.

If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pagesis trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the nameof the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’llsee ads related to weddings.If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to dowith your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title.Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you getbetter ads.

Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a font tag foryour heading, try using the h1 tag with headings that contain yourkeywords. That should help them to stand out to the robots.And if you don’t have any headlines at all, try adding some.

5.3 Finding Keywords

We know that Google’s robot searches websites for keywords, then reportsback and tells the company what kind of ads to send to the site. If your siteis about pension plans for example, then your keywords would be things like“retirement”, “401k” and “pension”.

Getting the right keywords on your site won’t just make your ads relevant; itwill also help you to make sure that the ads you get are the ones that paythe most.

There are all sorts of tools available on the Web that tell you how muchpeople are prepared to pay for keywords. http://www.overture.com/ andhttp://www.googlest.com/ let you see how much people are prepared to pay, andkeywords.clickhereforit.com also has a list of keywords with their prices.

Again, you don’t want to build a site just to cash in on a high paying keywordbut if you know that “401k” pays more than “retirement” for example, then itmakes sense to use the higher paying keywords more than the lower payingones.

5.4 Keyword Density

You’ll need the right keywords to get the right ads. But you’ll also need theright amount of keywords.

There’s no golden rule for the putting right number of keywords on a page toget the ads you want. You’ll just have to experiment. It also seems to be thecase that keyword density is counted across pages, especially for high-payingkeywords. If you have a site that's generally about cars and you write a pagefor car rental, a higher-paying keyword, you might find that you need toproduce several pages about car rental before you get the ads.

In general though, if you find that your ads are missing the point of yourpage and that your titles are all correct, then the next step would be to trymentioning your keywords more often and make sure that they’re all finelyfocused. For example, talking about “fire extinguishers” is likely to get youbetter results than talking generally about “safety equipment.”

5.5 Keyword Placement

It shouldn’t really matter where you put your keywords, should it? As long asthe right words are on the right page in the right amount of numbers, thatshould be enough to get you relevant ads, right?

Wrong.

One of the strangest results that people have had using AdSense is thatputting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on theads the site gets.

In my experience, the most important place on your webpage isdirectly beneath the AdSense box. The keywords you place there couldinfluence your ads.

For example, mentioning clowns in the space directly beneath the AdSensebox could give you ads about circuses and red noses!

Keeping that in mind, you could play with your ads in all sorts of ways. If youhad a site about camping for example, you might find that you’re getting lotsof ads about tents and sleeping bags, which would be fine. But if you alsowanted to make sure that one or two of your ads were about Yosemite ormobile homes, then mentioning those keywords once or twice on the pagedirectly below the AdSense box could give you ads for sites with that sort ofcontent too.

Bear in mind though that you’ll often find that you get ads that try tocombine the main thrust of your site with the words in that keyword spacebelow the ad box. So if you had a site about gardening and you mentioned“cabbages” beneath the ad box, you’re more likely to get ads about growingcabbages than ads about cabbage recipes.

Experimenting with the placement of the keywords could allow you to controlat least one or two of the ads you receive and help keep them varied. That’sdefinitely something to try.

5.7 No 'Baiting'!

Often I've clicked through a 'promising' website, only to find reams ofkeyword spam, interspersed with AdSense. Websites like these makeAdSense look bad.Keyword spam may trick search spiders, but your human visitors will leavedisappointed.

People hate being 'baited' by a web marketer. Offer content that makestheir visit worthwhile. Address the needs and concerns of your visitorswith original content.

Quality content builds trust and loyalty — and that, in turn, makes peoplewant to click. Search rankings may change, but loyal visitors keep comingback for more!

5.8 Changing Metatags

Metatags certainly aren’t what they used to be and in AdSense, they’rebarely anything at all. There’s a good chance that when it comes to decidingad relevance, your metatags have no effect whatsoever.I’ve already mentioned that the title of your page will have an effect. It’s alsovery likely that the description does too.But that doesn’t mean that your metatags are completely irrelevant when itcomes to AdSense. They aren’t. They’re only irrelevant when it comes toserving ads; they still play a role in search engine optimization and gettingyour site indexed faster.

5.9 Inviting The Robot

So far in this chapter, I’ve explained some of the ways that you can tweakyour page to keep your ads relevant. But the changes you make won’t haveany effect until Google’s robot stops by and re-indexes your page. What willgenerally happen is that once you upload your new page, you’ll still get theold ads and you might have to wait some time before the robot visits it againand you can find out whether your changes have the right result.To get the robot to stop by earlier, reload the page in your browser, and thenagain a few minutes later. Do not click on any of the ads just reload and waita few minutes before attempts.You should find that you receive new ads within a few minutes.

5.10 Public Service Ads

The penalty for not getting your keyword placement and density right isn’tjust irrelevant ads. It could also be no ads at all. If Google can’t find anyrelevant ads to give you, it could use your space to present public serviceads, which are very nice but they don’t pay you a penny. You might prefer toearn money and give it to a charity of your choice rather than give space onyour site to a cause that Google chooses.

The most obvious way to beat this problem is to specify an alternate URL inthe event that Google has no ads for you. You can do this from your AdSenseaccount. Instead of linking to the Red Cross or whoever it may be, you’llreceive a link to a site that you’ve pre-chosen. For example, I have set updefault ads for my 336x280 ad block.

http://www.worldvillage.com/336x280-1.html

They look remarkably like AdSense ads, don’t you think?

You can also use this space to deliver image-based ads that come from yourserver. For offers that pay per action (clicks or signups), I like to useWebSponsors.com. You can signup for a free account and find new ways tomonetize your unused ad space.

You can also use Google Backfill, a very neat service that allows you to selectkeywords relevant to your site and display targeted ads instead of the publicservice ads or your alternative URL. They’ll match your colors and styles andsplit the revenue 50/50. It’s all in line with Google’s TOS and makes goodalternative to no revenue at all while you get your keywords fixed. Theservice is available at www.allfeeds.com

5.11 Blocking Ads

Finally, the last way to control the ads you see on your site is to block adsyou don’t want. Google gives you a limit of 200 URL’s to block, which isn’tmuch. You might well find yourself burning through them pretty fast,especially if you try to block lower paying ads in favor of the higher-payingones. Playing with keywords, content and placement will give you muchbetter results.