Top 10 AdSense Tricks To Boost Your Commission
By Kalena Jordan
Google
AdSense is fast becoming the preferred
way for people to earn an income online. Forget
eBay and multiple affiliate programs. Whether
you are a work-at-home mom trying to make a
little extra cash or an Internet entrepreneur
with hundreds of monetized websites, AdSense is
truly the easiest way to earn money.
Simply sign up for a free account, grab your ad
code and paste it in your site. But here's the
amazing thing - no matter how much money AdSense
is making for you right now, a few simple tweaks
can increase that amount considerably. And I
should know, after learning about these tricks,
I more than doubled my AdSense commissions!
The self-proclaimed AdSense gurus and experts
are sharing this insider knowledge, for a fee.
You can learn all these secrets from them, as
long as you buy their e-book, sign up for their
seminar or purchase their newsletter. But I'm
going to share all their AdSense tricks for
free. Here they are:
1) Color code your ads to match your web site
palette *exactly*. Don't use frames around your
ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation
interface, make sure you choose the same color
as your page background for the ad frame and the
ad background.
When choosing the ad heading colors, match them
to the *exact* color of your page headings. Use
the exact same ad background shade as your page
background. Use the exact same ad text font and
color as the text on your pages. You can see an
example of this color-matching on my Search
Engine Advice Blog - notice the 4 link ad unit
and skyscraper text ad unit on the left hand
side under the headings Ads by Google as you
scroll down the page? The link and text colors
are identical to the color palette used
throughout the rest of the page.
Near enough is NOT good enough. If you can't
quite get the color matching right, use Google's
built in color palette together with the RGB to
HEX or vice versa color converter on
this page. That handy little tool was a life
saver for me.
This is probably the one single tweak that made
the most difference to my commission levels.
2) Try not to use the traditional horizontal
banner style or leaderboard image ads because
people are blind to them.
3) Use Google's own
AdSense optimization tips and visual heat
map to assist you in deciding where on your page
to place your AdSense ad code.
4) Research competitive keywords using a keyword
research tool such as
Keyword Discovery or grab
a list of the most popular keywords from various
sources and use them in your web site pages
where relevant.
This article is a good source of
frequently searched keywords. Targeting popular
keywords should trigger AdSense ads on your
pages that utilize those keywords. The more
popular the keyword or phrase, the higher
AdWords advertisers are generally willing to pay
per click for it so the higher your commission
on those clicks.
5) Incorporate the AdSense code into your page
so that the ads look like a regular part of your
site. You can see an example on this
Internet Dating Stories site where link ads are
incorporated within the regular left hand
navigation of the site under the heading
"Feature Links".
6) Use Google's new 4 and 5 link ad units
wherever possible. They seem to have a much
higher Click Through Rate (CTR) than regular ad
styles. You can view all the AdSense ad formats here.
7) Place images next to your ads to attract the eyes.
You can see this in place on the
search engine article library page at the bottom where
3 images draw your attention to the bottom of the page. But be careful here
- the use of arrows or symbols enticing viewers to click are NOT allowed by
Google and publishers may NOT label the Google ads with text other than
"sponsored links" or "advertisements".
8) Use the full allowance of multiple AdSense
ads on each of your pages - 3 regular AdSense
ads, plus 1 link unit. Use careful placement of
these ads so they blend into your site and don't
distract from your content. Clever use of this
allowance can be seen on this
page about bad
Internet dating stories where you see:
- 1 horizontal 4 link ad unit towards the top of
the page under the first paragraph
- 1 vertical skyscraper text ad unit about
halfway down the left hand side under "Sponsor
Links"
- 1 vertical skyscraper image ad unit down the
left hand side under "Sponsor Links"
- 1 horizontal text banner unit at the bottom of
the page with images above each ad to draw
attention to them.
You can also include 1 AdSense referral button
in addition to the 3 other units.
9) Tailor your page content to a particular
niche or focus. Page content that is tailored
towards a specific theme is more likely to
trigger AdWords ads that closely match the
content and are therefore more likely to
interest your visitors and inspire them to
click. Don't create pages merely for the sake of
placing AdSense ads. Visitors (and search
engines) can see through this ruse in an instant.
10) Use custom Ad Channels for each of your ad
placements, for example, "Top 5 Link Unit Blue
Palette" or "Left Side Navigation Image
Skyscraper" etc. Tweak, track and measure the
success of each of these custom channels so you
know what gives you the highest CTR. Some ad
formats and colors will work better than others,
but you won't know which until you test, test
and test some more!
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The above article may be re-published as long as
the following paragraph is included at the end
of the article and as long as you link to the
URL mentioned below:
Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first
search engine optimization experts in Australia,
who is well known and respected in the industry,
particularly in the U.S. As well as running her
own SEO business, Kalena manages Search
Engine College, an online training
institution offering
instructor-led short courses and downloadable
self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization
and Search Engine Marketing
subjects.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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Winners announced next month. For your chance to
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your own caption entry by midnight on April
29.
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Greetings Readers!
Welcome to another addition of The Search
Light. A bit of housekeeping first up. Some
of you are new to this newsletter and you may
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Your feedback and support have had a huge impact
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I started this newsletter to help you understand
search engines and use them to market your sites
more effectively, so please get in touch if
there are any topics you're confused about or
would like to see covered in future issues. My
email link is at the bottom of the page. This
month's article is actually a mini-tutorial
teaching you how you can double your Google
AdSense commissions with a few simple tweaks
to the way you place the code on your web pages.
Now get reading the rest of this issue and
remember to visit the daily
Search Engine Advice Column to check out
my answers to frequently asked search engine
questions or submit one of your own.
Till next time - wishing you high rankings...
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| FAQ1: How does Google rank search results? | | |
 Dear Kalena...
I am very confused by Google. I don't understand
why my site is not positioned highly for certain
keywords when it is good quality and has a lot
of traffic. How do they determine who ranks
above whom?
Confused
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear Confused
Google has a highly technical way
of indexing and ranking pages. Just because you
consider your site to be of high quality doesn't
mean that Google thinks the same. Also, the
amount of traffic your site gets does not
necessarily impact how relevant Google finds it
to be when matching it with search queries.
To better understand how Google works, I suggest
you read the tutorial How
Does Google Collect and Rank Results?
written by Google software engineer Matt Cutts.
Kalena | | |
| FAQ2: Which is the best Google Sitemap creator to use? | | |
 Dear Kalena...
I have been searching for an online tool that
will create an XML sitemap for Google
automatically and I've found quite a few. But
they all seem quite complicated and some of them
charge a fee.
Do you have a favorite or can you recommend a
good one to use, preferably a free one?
thanks
Akita
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear Akita
Funny you should mention this. To create my Google
Sitemaps, I had been using SiteMaps
Pal, but I haven't been completely happy
with it because it seemed to skip
sub-directories and pages quite often.
But just this week I came across the free XML Sitemaps
Generator and I'm now a big fan. It not only
trawls through ALL levels of your site, but it
gives you a running count of pages, provides a
text-based URL list and a HTML sitemap you can
import straight into your site, plus it
generates the XML file for you in both
compressed and un-compressed versions.
Sweet! If only the free version
gave you the ability to manually edit page
priority and index dates and re-generate the
XML, I'd be an even bigger fan (hint hint!)
There is also a low-cost script-based version
for sites with thousands of pages. It can be set
up to index your site on a regular basis and
produce an updated XML file for automatic upload
to your site via FTP. The XML Sitemaps Generator
is also included in Google's
List of 3rd Party Plugins for Sitemaps.
Kalena | | |
| FAQ 3: Why has my site been kicked out of Google? | | |
 Dear Kalena...
I was searching for reason of site to be out of
google. And I landed up on this
page.
I am not a good site optimizer, but I am trying
to built up the network of some sites.
Everything was going fine. But one of my site
was kicked out by google yesterday. It is not
very old site but all of the sudden, all the
pages of site are out of google. Please review
the site and network sites.
I need your valuable suggestions. That would be
a big help for me.
Ankur
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear Ankur
I've checked and your site is indeed missing
from Google. From my quick glance, your site
appears to be using excessive keyword repetition
and keyword-stuffed comment tags. Better compare
your site with Google's
Webmaster Guidelines, get rid of the dodgy
tactics and submit a reinclusion request pronto.
Kalena | | |
| FAQ 4: Which of these dynamic URLs are more acceptable to Google? | | |
 Dear Kalena...
For dynamic pages, can you comment on if either
one of these URLs are more acceptable by Google?
Or is anything beyond the ? treated the same way
and it doesn't matter how many perimeters are
after the "?"?
http://www.site.com/products/default.asp?cat=C001
http://www.site.com/products/default.asp?a=1&i=4
M Fong
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear M Fong
According to their Webmaster
Guidelines, Google doesn't index URLs that
include session ids after the query string:
"Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your
URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index".
As far as I understand, the more parameters your
URLs include, the more chance you have that
Google will not index that page. But that is
more to do with Googlebot trying to restrict the
excessive server load created when indexing an
unknown quantity of dynamic content.
To ensure your important content is always
indexed, keep it within your top 2 directory
levels, avoid session ids in your URLs and
submit an XML sitemap to Google
SiteMaps.
Kalena | | |
| FAQ 5: Why does my site show different results for searches with and without www? | | |
 Dear Kalena...
I was trying to find out a little about some
file requests on my log files when I found your
blog. I tried my website using the site query
thingy with and without the www. bit and got a
different number on the results. I also got a
few pages which say 300 Multiple Choices, they
also end with the file extension .asp.
I would be grateful for any light you could shed
on this
for me, my website has a great ranking and a
great position on the search engines, I am a bit
wary of changing anything just in case it
disappears altogether.
Peter
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Dear Peter
I'm not 100% sure what your question is but I'm
assuming it's: "Why does my site show
different results for searches with and without
www?".
I've checked your site and it looks like it's
suffering from the Dupe
Domain Indexing Dilemma. This can happen
when your server is configured to show your site
at both domain versions (with www and without).
See the link above for how to fix this using a
301 redirect.
Sometimes Google can logically work out which is
the correct version of your site, even if it
loads with or without www, but sometimes Google
can't. See this
post for more info. One way to tell for sure
if you've got DDID and whether it's a problem,
is to install the Google
Toolbar and see if it shows different
Toolbar PageRank for each version of your site.
If so, then you most likely have a problem.
That's what I did with your site. Hope this helps!
Kalena | | |
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