Adsense Optimization: How to apply Top Paying Keywords?

Applying top paying keywords in your website is quite similar to Search Engine Optimization. However, there are many differences as well. I have done in-depth research on the subject. On the basis of that research, I have marked the points you need to keep in mind while optimizing your website for maximum payouts through highest paying Adsense keywords. We will discuss how to apply top paying keywords as well as traffic pulling keywords to a webpage for maximum payouts and traffic.

First of all, we must understand that Google Adsense bot (formally known as Google Mediabot) is a subset of Google's main crawler. The crawler detects the theme of the pages and makes an entry in the Google's index (a private index - not shown publicly) that records the theme of all the pages hosting Adsense script. In other words, Google Mediabot has the characteristics somewhat similar to Google's main crawler.

There are two types of optimizations that you need to follow to make a web page search engine optimized. Same is the case with Adsense Optimization.

Internal Optimization : Internal Optimization includes Meta tags, Title Text, Optimization of content, and internal linking of your website. Here we will learn how to increase relevancy of ads and how to inject keywords that will help you get high paying ads. Internal Optimization has a high impact on the relevancy of ads and CTR.

External Optimization : This includes the web pages that are giving links to you (external profile of your website), anchor text being used to link your website, and many more variables that search engines use to evaluate the authoritative importance of a web page. External Optimization helps bring relevant traffic to your website and enables you to earn more by getting more CTR (Click Thru Ratio).

How long does your webpage take to show high paying ads?

This is an important question that needs to be answered. As soon as you apply Adsense script in a webpage, it is visited by the Google Mediabot (within 2 hours to 48 hours, if the bot is free - immediately). Google Mediabot's responsibility is to evaluate the theme of the web page, and enable ads almost immediately so that your website traffic does not see FREE SERVICE ADS.

The relevancy of ads increases as Google's main crawler visits your website and updates its index. Furthermore, you may observe an increase in the earnings as the PR of your website/web page increases. This means that in case of Google Adsense, the internal factors that affect the ads of a particular page are evaluated by Google Mediabot (but Google's main crawler can overwrite them). And on the other hand, the external factors are inspected by the Google Crawler over a period of time. Having said that, there are simply many many factors (including those which you cannot control) that affect your ads. We are going to discuss the factors that you can control. Lets take control!

Remember:

1. Relevancy of ads may increase as your page is indexed by Google.
2. EPC (Earnings Per lick) may increase as your PR increases.
3. It entirely depends upon you how well you promote your website and get maximum earnings from your website/web pages.
4. In case of Google, many variables are involved.

AdSense Tip: How to Increase AdSense CTR

An increase in CTR can mean a lot to AdSense Revenue. To increase AdSense revenue, you have to either increase the traffic or CTR. If somehow, you manage to triple your CTR just by tweaking the Google AdSense code, you can get three times more traffic. Here are a few tips for increasing your CTR.

Topics Covered in this Guide:

- What Google AdSense Engineers say about CTR
- What Webmasters have concluded about CTR
- Traffic and its effects on CTR
- Experiments with CTR

What Google AdSense Engineers Say

- An email conversation with a Google Engineer:
“Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages.”

- Google Optimization Guide:
For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the article tends to perform better. It's almost as if the users finish reading and asking themselves, “What can I do next?” Precisely targeted ads are just like answering their questions.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

What Webmasters have concluded

Webmasters have diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the keywords you are targeting, look of your website, quality of its content, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization, and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works well.
If you develop a poor quality content website, it will likely give you high CTR and clicks, but you will be getting low priced ads. Besides, nobody will like to add your URL to their favorites. However, if you have quality content that keeps the visitors glued, you may get low CTR, but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors.

Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch the changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have.

The Traffic

AdSense comes after traffic. No traffic, no AdSense. Take good care of your traffic. Your visitors expect some valuable information from you. Make sure you are providing quality content to them. This will increase your visitors’ return back ratio. And only those visitors who are less targeted, will return to the content you are providing. More targeted users mean more CTR. 85% of my visitors add my website URLs in their favorites. And they do return.

Install a website stats monitoring software and regularly look at your web logs. Identify where exactly is the traffic coming from. Try to establish a pattern or relation between your AdSense stats and traffic stats. This will help you analyze the reasons for any marked deviations in the inflow of traffic. This will give you new ideas to develop traffic.

Experiments

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve the highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel. Keep experimenting till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, every such experiment will make you lose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in the long run.

AdSense Tip: How to Increase AdSense CTR

An increase in CTR can mean a lot to AdSense Revenue. To increase AdSense revenue, you have to either increase the traffic or CTR. If somehow, you manage to triple your CTR just by tweaking the Google AdSense code, you can get three times more traffic. Here are a few tips for increasing your CTR.

Topics Covered in this Guide:

- What Google AdSense Engineers say about CTR
- What Webmasters have concluded about CTR
- Traffic and its effects on CTR
- Experiments with CTR

What Google AdSense Engineers Say

- An email conversation with a Google Engineer:
“Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages.”

- Google Optimization Guide:
For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the article tends to perform better. It's almost as if the users finish reading and asking themselves, “What can I do next?” Precisely targeted ads are just like answering their questions.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

What Webmasters have concluded

Webmasters have diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the keywords you are targeting, look of your website, quality of its content, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization, and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works well.
If you develop a poor quality content website, it will likely give you high CTR and clicks, but you will be getting low priced ads. Besides, nobody will like to add your URL to their favorites. However, if you have quality content that keeps the visitors glued, you may get low CTR, but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors.

Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch the changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have.

The Traffic

AdSense comes after traffic. No traffic, no AdSense. Take good care of your traffic. Your visitors expect some valuable information from you. Make sure you are providing quality content to them. This will increase your visitors’ return back ratio. And only those visitors who are less targeted, will return to the content you are providing. More targeted users mean more CTR. 85% of my visitors add my website URLs in their favorites. And they do return.

Install a website stats monitoring software and regularly look at your web logs. Identify where exactly is the traffic coming from. Try to establish a pattern or relation between your AdSense stats and traffic stats. This will help you analyze the reasons for any marked deviations in the inflow of traffic. This will give you new ideas to develop traffic.

Experiments

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve the highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel. Keep experimenting till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, every such experiment will make you lose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in the long run.

How to Improve Adsense Revenue

Dear Reader,

This e-commerce article will help you make more money with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publishing Network. All information given below does not infringe any TOS of the respective service, of course.

First of all, PPC ads like those provided by AdSense or YPN are great ways to earn money online, especially if you have an established and content-rich website. AdSense ads are targeted ads, which means they fit to the site's content. Therefore it's likely they will meet the visitors' interests. This usually leads to a high click-through ratio (CTR) on AdSense ads compared to the CTR of normal non-targeted banner ads.

Now, how can you increase your AdSense earnings once you have placed the ads on your site? Don't worry, there is much you can do.

First, let's take a look at the factors which directly influence ad performances:

1. unique visitors and page impressions
2. CTR
3. targeting
4. CPC
You will increase your PPC revenue by improving one or more of the above factors.

1. Improving the Web site's traffic
By driving more visitors to your site you will probably increase the number of ad clicks, because there are more people who see the ads. In addition, if you can get more page impressions on your website you will also have more ad impressions which might result in higher PPC earnings.

Attracting more visitors can be achieved by optimizing your website for the search engines, but also by adding more high quality content and unique services to your site. Also, your site should have at least an “okay design,” because your visitors will probably not go to your site again if it looks too terrific. In case you don't know how to do search engine optimization: I will write an article on this topic as well in the future.

Better traffic stats will increase the number of ad impressions. However, this does not mean you have got a higher CTR. The CTR could still be the same or even lower than before though, so you also need to improve another of the above factors.

2. How to get a higher CTR
There are many options you can choose to get a higher click ratio.

For instance, you have the possibility to change the ads themselves.

2.1 Ad Colors
In general you have two kinds of ad colors to choose from:

1. ads that stand out, and
2. ads that blend in.
Both may have their positives and negatives, but all in all you need to experiment with those types of color palettes to see which works best with your site. In my personal experience - and what I have been told from most webmasters I have talked to - colors that blend in perform better. Others have experienced better click ratios from outstanding ad colors though, so this is something you really should try out yourself. Whatever option you choose, you should at least try your ads to fit to the website's design and color scheme though.

My personal tip is: Match the ad's text color with the color of your Web site's content's text color and match the link color of the ad with your site's link color.

2.2 Ad Placement
Another factor incfluencing the CTR is the placement of your ad. AdSense ads should not be hidden from your visitors, but they should be visible at first sight. Again, there are still several places you can choose for your ads to appear.

Text ads seem to attract most clicks at the top or in the center of a website's content area - especially on websites with much text content.

Do you already know the so-called “heat map” by Google? It illustrates profitable ad placements on an example site layout. The fields which are colored dark orange experience the best performance while those fields with a brighter color do not perform that well.

Anyway, the heat map is only a tip for you. It's based on Google's researches from many different websites with AdSense ads, but the heat map possibly does not show the perfect ad placement area for your own site. So - again - it's up to you to try where on your website ads work best.

To give you a direction: On sites with an article, ads which are placed directly below the article seem to do quite well. In addition, you should also place an ad above the article, so people can click on it at the top and at the bottom of the page.

Important is that ads are placed where the user's eyes are likely to focus on them. You should also try to place the ads throughout your whole site, because this adds variety across your site and users have more selection. Also, more ads mean more revenue, in my experience.

In case you're running a forum please pay attention to the “AdSense on Forums” section below. There I will discuss the specific placement criteria for forums.

2.3 Ad Format
The third way to improve ad performance is to choose another ad format. AdSense provides you with many different ad formats.

In general, wide formats seem to perform better than narrow formats. This is because people can read more words at a time without having to skip a line. I've experienced that the 336x280 large rectangle, the 250x250 square and the 160x600 wide skyscraper have done best on my sites. These are quite big ad formats, of course, so they need lots of space, but if they're placed well they usually generate more income than the smaller and narrow ad formats.

Another good format is the wide 728x90 leaderboard, which does best under the editorial content of a web page or directly under the page header, in my experience. The 468x60 banner format does not convert that well, but it can still be placed in areas where there isn't much space available, i.e. directly in the page header (next to the logo) or within articles.

3. Targeting
The targeting of PPC ads is very important, because targeted ads perform much better than untargeted banners. Therefore you should make sure all ads on your website show targeted ads which fit to your site's content. This will increase the CTR of the ads and also result in a better branding of your site, because people only find content and links that fit to your site's topic.

Many webmaster have problems with ads that don't show proper text links. Anyway, it's quite easy to target PPC ads.

The first you should do is to control whether the site has enough content. The more text content there is the faster and more accurate your ads will be targeted by Google's bots. So you should add additional content to your site to get better ads.

If you still don't get advertising links that fit to your site's content and thus to your visitors' interests, you should implement section targeting.

Section targeting is a very useful tool to help Google find the best ads for your site. It allows you to suggest sections of your text content that you'd like Google to emphasize when matching ads to your site's content.

You can implement section targeting by adding special HTML comments to your site's HTML code.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:





If you want Google to ignore specific sections of your site when targeting ads you need to use the following comment tag:



Here's an example of how your site's code should look like after implementing section targeting:

< html >< head >< title >Your Site's Title< /title >< /head >

< body >

This is text content of your Web page.



This is the text which you want Google to emphasize when targeting ads.



Here might also be some content.

< /body >

< /html >

Please keep in mind a significant amount of content should be placed within the section targeting tags, because insufficient content might result in less relevant ads to appear on your site. Also, it is against Google's TOS to use ad targeting to display ads which don't fit to your site's content, so you only may use section targeting to emphasize content sections of your site which include proper content.

Another way to improve ad targeting for your site is to emphasize specific terms by making them bold (< strong > or < em >) or making them a heading (< h1 > or < h2 >). Google will pay special attention to emphasized terms and phrases within your Web page.

< strong >4. CPC< /strong >
The fourth way to improve your total advertising income is to get a higher cost per click on ads displayed on your site. But how to increase the CPC?

First of all, you should do some research on different keywords which fit to your site's topic. Go to Google and perform searches for these keywords. The more AdWords ads appear in the right bar of Google's search results the likelier it is that ads for the regarding keyword have got a higher CPC. In addition, you can take advantage of Overture's Bidtool to determine which keywords pay well in terms of PPC advertising. Although the Overture tool is a direct indicator for the YPN, you can still use it to get a good idea of the keywords' click prices.

Now that you know which keywords AdSense should display ads for on your site the only thing you need to do is to target ads for the keyword(s) you have chosen. You can do this by adding additional and targeted content and by emphasizing words or complete sections of your web page, as explained above.

5. Google Search Box
AdSense also offers the possibility to implement Google Search into your website. Google Search is a useful service for your users, it can search either your site or the whole Internet. The search results pages can be customized to fit with your site's theme, and you'll be paid for every valid click on the ads that appear. The search box is also great to earn money from visitors who did not find what they were looking for on your site, because the search box allows them to search exactly for what they have been looking for and it will display ads that are targeted based on the keyword(s) they search for.

So the Google Search Box can earn you some extra money. You should not expect too much from the search box though. I have only been able to increase income by 1 to 3 per cent through Google Search.

6. Optimization Tips for Forums
While I have already written much about placing ads on “usual” websites here are some tips on how to make more money from PPC ads displayed within forums:

Ad Format & Placement
160x600 Skyscraper ads placed above the fold on the left side of your forum seem to perform very well. However, you should also place a 728x90 leaderboard ad below the forum's header. The combination of these two ad formats works well and results in a high CTR, in my experience.

This can also be seen in Google's Heat Map and I can only confirm the ad placements suggested by the heat map.

In addition, you should also place an ad between the first and the second post of the threads in the forum. There already exists a script for vBulletin which automatically displays PPC ads in this place. You should integrate this script to your forum to improve PPC income.

Above I have written that a leaderboard ad directly below the editorial content would work fine. This suggestion also works with forums. Therefore it is a good idea to place a leaderboard ad directly below the last post of the thread, because user's who read the whole thread might be looking for the next link to click on - and what's a better link than a targeted PPC link?

Anyway, this would require you to remove the leaderboard ad below the forum's header, because you may only display 3 AdSense ads per page. I would recommend to do so, because the leaderboard ad at the bottom of the page seems to perform better than the ad below the header, in my experience (and against Google's heat map). Instead, I would place one of Google's horizontal link units below the header (a link unit may be placed as an additional ad, so you can display more than 3 ads per page).

Over all you should try to use ads that blend in, because people spend lots of time in forums and the forum design should not be disrupted by outstanding ad colors.

Google's Search Box can also be implemented into your forum. I'd suggest to place it directly in the forum's search tool. For instance, dnforum.com offers its members to use both the forum's and Google's site search.

Well, that's it. I think I've written everything which came up to my mind at the moment.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article and at least some of the above information will be useful for you.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Raghav