Search Optimization School

You know, I planned on writing a lot of articles for this site to help webmasters get better and higher web page rankings in the search engines. However, the whole reason a webmaster wants better rankings is to get more traffic. And 98% of web site owners want to monetize that traffic and turn it into money. One of the most common ways to turn that traffic into money is by using google adsense. Back in the early days of the web, putting ads on your site - like banner ads or popups, was seen as “selling out”. Nowadays - everybody wants to sell out, and find and exploit the easiest ways to make money online. Unfortunately this has led to many web sites being setup with mostly ads and little content. These are MFA or “Made for Adsense” sites, or a web site with little or no other purpose than to make money from adsense. Sometimes you will see what I call DCA sites, or “Daisy Chain Adsense” sites. This is where you search for something in google, and click on a result and go to an MFA site with mostly ads. Clicking on one of those ads leads you to another MFA, and another, and another, etc. The site owner loves this because you have click on multiple ads multiple times paying him each time through adsense revenue. The user hates this, because it’s just more and more wasted time online trying to find what you’re looking for.

Web site owners have complained for a very long time that google has done nothing about this, and in fact encouraged by allowing it to occur. Many have speculated that google doesn’t mind since every click (of an adsense ad) just makes them more money - so they turn a blind eye. Well, no more - because google has finally decided to put an end to shady web site owners profiting off of their back. In the last few weeks hundreds, if not thousands, of “low value content” web sites have had their accounts cancelled because “they were not a good fit for the adsense program”. This is great news for search engine users, google is actually trying to improve it’s results.

Google has also cancelled many adsense (and adwords) accounts for using “arbitrage” for profit. Arbitrage is the practice of buying keywords through a google adwords account to target and send traffic to your web site, and then having adsense ads on your web pages for people to click on once they get there. Basically, these site owners are betting that by doing a little research - they can buy really cheap keywords through adwords, and then make more money (than they spent) by users clicking on adsense ads once they get there. Essentially “arbitrage” or “buying your own traffic” just seems ethically wrong, and google must think so as well since they’ve been actively shutting down both adsense and adwords accounts of people suspected of doing this.

It’s good that google is valuing quality search results over profit, and this would go hand in hand with their “don’t be evil” policy. Even though google is the dominant search engine, with as much of a stranglehold on search as Microsoft has on the desktop, I think they are looking ahead to the future. They want to retain that position, and they know that keeping the search results as pure as possible keeps them competitive.

Google has also been cracking down on other web sites lately that are in violation with their TOS (Terms of Service). I was personally caught up in this myself, as one of my sites received a warning email from google stating that I violated the adsense TOS because my website contained “adult or mature” content. At first I was pretty pissed of - because this site as in excess of 30,000 pages. And a lot of the content is derived from current headlines and popular news stories. I have a block in one of the margins on this site that lists the top 20 (accessed) stories for that day. I forget sometimes the real nature of people. Take a look sometimes at the top searched keywords for different search engines. Inevitably, the top 20 always have something to do with sex or adult themes. Time after time, these are the most popular things that people search for. Out of the 30,000 pages my web site has less than 300 with stories about or related to sex and adult themes. That’s about 1% of my content. However, out of the “top 20 accessed” block on my site - probably 15 are adult themed or sex related. By sheer human nature, they just always seem to end up the most popular. Google has determined that because of this that they don’t want (adsense) to be associated with this web site.

Ironically, many of the ads that appeared through adsense were adult related - from people buying adult keywords through google adwords. So one argument is that they should control the purchase of certain keywords in adwords in addition to closing adsense accounts on adult related sites. Also - google has begun attacking “duplicate content”. Duplicate content is just what you think it is - the same content on 2 different web sites, or 2 different pages on the same web site. With so many blogs and aggregators, news headlines sites, etc., it is very important that the originator of a story get much higher preference in search results vs. the “duplicate content” sites.

Google isn’t killing the adsense accounts for sites with duplicate content - but they are giving preference to the originating sites, and sending the duplicate content URL’s to a “supplemental index”. So, it’s more important now than ever write original content in your web sites. Google has recently applied for 2 patents that accomplish this. The first is for LSI or “Latent Semantic Indexing”. The second is for “Phrase Matching”. These patents, along with a 600,000 keyword index will drastically change which web site pages are indexed and where they come up in the search results. You can tell that in may ways, this goes hand in hand with google’s removing of “low value content” web sites. Sites with “duplicate content” are pretty much low value too aren’t they? And by removing all but the original to a “supplemental index”, aren’t you making your search results even more pure?

So be aware of these new google rules, and how they might affect both your web site, and your adsense and adwords accounts. Content is king!? You can read about google’s new actions in many webmaster forums, like these postings over at Webmaster World.

JenSense had a post linking to 25 Tips to Optimize Your Blog for Readers and Search Engines over at Search Engine Land.

There were some great tips in that article, like using feedbutton for your rss widget, and using feedblitz.com to allow users to subscribe to rss posts via email. I hadn’t previously known about either service. Read the entire article for all 25 tips. Sometimes the best tips come after the article - in the comments that readers post. One reader added a link to his own 25 tips for blog marketing, a short list - but a worthy read. Another posted about a service for users to get blog posts via text message through open.4info.net, something I hadn’t considered before.

Also, quite a few comments talk about the value of participating in comments after posts. As I already said, sometimes I find the most valuable information in these comments, and I add something worthwhile whenever I can. But even if you only thank the author, if you leave your web site address you just created a link back to your site. This alone helps search engine rankings, but if you have an insightful comment with valuable information, users are likely to follow that link back to your site. Actually, in one of the comments I found a link to this blog posts about never blogging alone - or the ‘long tail’ of comments. This guy went through his logs and found that 26% of his blog traffic was directly from posting comments on other sites.

Read up and implement some of these great tips, and integrate them into the regular postings in your blog or site. A little hard work every day will blossom into a well known authoritative blog in no time!

My main web site is getting almost 10,000 unique pageviews per day.? The homepage of that site has a PR of 3….well sometimes.? And other times it has a PR of 4.? The PR flips and flops back and forth between 3 and 4.? Sometimes for a day - and sometimes for only a portion of the day.? But what I have noticed is that when the page is PR 4 I always make more money in adsense.? Of course my google adsense terms and conditions don’t allow me to reveal exactly what I make, but I can tell you that usually when my PR is 4 for a day or more I make about 45-50% more.

What this tells me is….when you have a higher pagerank - you get more money per click.? I mean, if the pageviews and number of clicks are comparable and the only variable is the PR - you are getting more money per click.? I am not a user of adwords - and what I wonder about is when advertisers are targeting my site, do they know my PR?? Are they paying more because of it?? Or is it simply an adsense algorithm that knows when to funnel higher paying ads to my site, and when not to?? Add some comments if you have them - I’m interested in what others out there have to say…

If you have a blog, then every time you post something - the software your blog is managed in “pings” (sends out a notice) services, letting them know that you now have new content available. This is usually automatic. Some blogs (like Wordpress) allow you to update the list of ping “servers”.

Why would you want to do this? Well, the more people that know about your blog - the more it gets visited, indexed, and searched!! That’s why! This blog uses Wordpress, and I was able to increase the list of “ping servers” from the default of one to over forty using the list of ping servers on Elliot Back’s blog.

How to get Started: The Basics of Using Adsense

Adsense placement on blogs was taboo at one time, you were almost an outsider of you used them. I think that over the last few years most have realized that it takes a lot of time (and sometimes money, depending on bandwidth) to author a quality blog or web site. While “information should be free” sprit of the Internet is still alive, placing text ads on a web site is more and more common every day.

What is Google Adsense?

Adsense is a contextual ad-serving resource provided by google. Signup for a free account, place the code they give you on your web pages, and when visitors come to your site the google ads will appear in and around your content. How ‘relevant’ the ads are to your web site visitors depends on where you placed the code in your pages, and what format(s) you used to create the ads during setup. If your visitors click on the links in the ads - you get paid for each click. Each time an ad is shown it’s called an impression, and each time someone clicks an ad it’s called a click-through. The number of times someone clicks an ad per 100 visitors to your site would be your click-through percentage. How much you get paid per click depends on many variables, including what advertisers are willing to pay per click on a site like yours - and what your search relevance or page rank is.

Can I Really Make Money with Adsense in My Web Site?

Yes, you can make money with ad-sense in your web site. In fact, this entire web site is full of information and tutorials to optimize your web site to make the most money it possibly can from adsense and affiliate programs. Of course - this is hard work, and you will only be successful if you learn the tools necessary and put them to work. Adsense dollars don’t fall from the sky, you have to create them. Google won’t even pay you until you’ve made more than $100 in revenue. Let’s hope you don’t get discouraged before you reach that landmark. Also - if you don’t have original quality content in your site to begin with to generate quality traffic in the first place, chances are you won’t be too successful with adsense. The more successful your web site, the more successful you’ll be with Adsense. In fact, some people are making from $100-$1,000 per day in adsense revenue - making it a potentially lucrative opportunity.

Maybe you’d like to read some real stories - directly from web site owners, about their success with adsense. You should read Blogging for Dollars and find out how a quality, well-written, passionate blog or web site can go from $5 a month to $100 a day revenue with adsense. Or, if you want to shoot for the moon, you might want to read $1 Million Dollars per year in Google Adsense. Probably the best real word account I’ve read of adsense success or failure is Is Google Adsense Making Me Rich? over at ProBlogger. Darren Rowse is right-on -the-money with that post. He also has a poll and post about the rise of six figure bloggers, that illustrates the growing number of people making a very good living from adsense.

Where Can I find the Best Adsense Resources?

We will be publishing many adsense articles, but in this post I will give you links to some of the best adsense resources to get you started:

Google itself publishes a lot of quality information about adsense. If you doubt for a second that people are doing well using adsense - go and read some of the adsense success stories and case studies that google makes available.
You will find that (as I already mentioned) quality content in your blog or web site will get you not only the best page rank and relevancy - but also that it will get you the highest ad relevancy and click-through, generating more revenue per capita. Eric Wolfram’s article on “How to Score Higher in Google Search Engine” is very much on a par with the best there is in regards to authoring a quality web site, with quality content.

For quick adsense help (from adsense subscribers), I recommend the google groups adsense forums. You could also visit the google adsense help center, or browse adsense topics.
Google also has it’s own adsense blog, called “Inside Adsense”. I would subscribe to this in your RSS reader, so you always hear the latest adsense announcements - directly from the source.

Subscribe to some other RSS feeds from Adsense-related blogs - like Jensense.

Is google perfect? Any huge service used en masse is prone to it’s share of problems, and reading some posts from disgruntled adsense users probably wouldn’t hurt in case you run into problems.

What’s the Best Way to Place Adsense in Your Web Site?

Well, the only one who can determine that is you, but I can point you in the right direction to get some expert advice. First, head over to google and look over the adsense ad formats to see which ones might fit your site the best. Once you choose a format, you might want to do some research to find out layouts and placement tend to give the most click-thru, earning you the most revenue. You should look at the AdSense Heat Map to see where google thinks the best placement of ads is.
For instance, some say that placing the adsense ads within the confines of your content or blog post is the best way to get the most relevant ads (and highest click-through). Others might say that it also offends more of your readers. I guess that would be a judegement call on your part, and depend on what kind of site and content you have. At very least, you should read this post on How to Place Google Adsense Ads Next to Your Text.

Are There Alernatives to Adsense?

Sure there are, and you should check them out to see if one might work better for you. Just be aware, that some of the ‘articles’ you find out there may be slanted towards using something other than google (for the benefit of that site owner getting credit for you signing up, and not based on the merit of the service). In that sprit, check out Don’t Settle for Google Adsense.

But that’s just one example. I’ll add more here, as I research which ones are the best adsense alternative. In the meantime, here’s a link to 130 Adsense Alernatives or “Online Advertising Network roundup”.

I use Wordpress (or Drupal, or Joomla, or PHPNuke, or Xoops, or Mambo, or Blogger, or Typepad…

How do you use Adsense? It should be pretty easy, if you search for the information. Most of these blog services, packages, or Content Management Systems (CMS) have the ability to set adsense up via plugin - so you don’t have to manually edit the PHP or HTML code yourself (which many people don’t know how to do). For example, here you can find the Wordpress plugin for Adsense Deluxe.

Is Adsense just for Web Pages?

Well, it was, but now google has opened up adsense for feeds beta. So, now you can add adsense to the rss feed of your web site, and when people read your feed in their favorite rss aggregator - you will have a chance to earn even more revenue!

As always - there will be more to come with this post and on this subject!