Improving Your Adsense Returns

Adsense is a great program, if you run a content based website, then it can effectively offer you 'free money'. Basically just by placing Google's AdSense code on your site you can make money from anyone who clicks through on any one of those ads.

This is great and most website owners end-up applying for the AdSense program. Once approved the tendency is to log into your account, chose a few ad formats, place them on your site and wait for the money to start rolling in... or not...


The truth is that AdSense is extremely easy to implement (you just copy the text from Google's website and paste it into your own site). But it's actually fairly complex to get right. That's why many website owners feel very, very disappointed when they reach the end of the first month and little money has come through.

Partly this is because displaying ads on your site is a numbers game... The more people you have coming to your site the more likely it is that they will click on the ads on your site. Typically you will get a click-through rate of between 1% and 5% (ie for every 100 people who visit your site only between 1 and 5 of them will click on an ad). You can improve this number by altering the layout of your ads (ie ad size, font colours and border colours) where plain ads that actually resemble the overall look and feel of the text on your site tend to perform best. Basically you're trying to make the ads merge in with the content of your site so that they do not look like ads. That's why some of the more unusual ad sizes can look better than the standard 'banner' style of ads.

Obviously you also need to look after your SEO. You need to build more links so that more people find your website and see your pages (remember that earning income from ads is a numbers game, the more people who visit your site, the more clicks you get).

However, it's also often forgotten that each ad is worth a certain amount of money and only pays you a certain amount for each click. You want to get ads to your site that will entice your visitors to click on them and which will earn you the most income. This is why you need to pay particular attention to how your website is indexed and the keywords you have.

Your keywords should always be related to your site's content, however some keywords are better at getting high-paying ads than others. Also , the google bots index the whole of your site and if you have a complex page with lots of links this may not be a good thing.

The links and other text you have may lead to areas of your site and topics that are not related to the main focus of the page they're on (this is particularly true of portal sites and forums and article sites) and this is where Google provides tools to help you. One of the most important of these is a series of tags:

text of section

This tells Google that the text between those tags is the most important part of a web pate. Now, the remainder of the page won't be ignored but whatever's between those tags will be given extra weighting. Google recommends that you include at least 20% of a page's content in those sections and you certainly can't use it to just highlight certain words and phrases. But if your page is complex and especially if your page design puts some of the main navigation elements before the main content it can be very powerful.

If, however, you want certain text on your pages to be ignored completely for ad indexing you can use the following tags:

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

text of section

Using these tools can help you dramatically help the focussing of ads on your site and this can help your click-through rates and incomes.




Dyfed Lloyd Evans runs the Celtnet Articles free article directory. He is also the author of the How to Maximize your Web Traffic eBook (and the associated free eCourse).