AdWords and Search Advertising Terms

Account: A Google AdWords account provides the Web space in which you
design and operate a campaign. Opening an account costs nothing; activating
your account costs five dollars. Account holders have access to Google’s keyword
research and traffic estimation tools, even before activation. Therefore,
you can conceive and budget a complete ad campaign before spending a dime.
Activation: To activate a Google AdWords account, you select a payment
method and currency and provide billing details. After you activate an account,
you’re ready to launch a campaign.
Activation fee: A five-dollar fee is charged when AdWords advertisers
first activate their accounts. An additional five-dollar fee is imposed every
third time you reactivate a campaign after Google has stopped it due to
underperformance.
Glossary 329
Actual cost-per-click: As compared to cost-per-click, the actual cost-per-click
is the billable amount charged by Google when a searcher clicks your ad. This
amount might be the same as or lower than your maximum bid for your ad
placement, but it’s never higher.
Ad Group: The main subdivision of an ad Campaign, an Ad Group consists
of one or more ads associated with one or more keywords. Keywords define
the Ad Group. New Ad Groups in a Campaign are associated with different
keywords, though they might have the same ads.
AdRank: Advertisements are placed in sequence based on AdRank, with the
top-ranked ad at the top of the column. AdRank is measured as a combination
of bid value (maximum CPC set by the advertiser) and clickthrough rate (CTR).
Successful ads with high CTRs are sometimes ranked and placed higher than
less successful ads with higher CPC bids. The measurement, ranking, and
placement of ads are automated.
AdWords column: The right-hand stack of AdWords advertisements on a
Google search results page. Ads are placed in that column according to
AdRank, which is a calculation of maximum CPC and clickthrough rate.
Affiliate (aff): Affiliate marketers direct their clickthroughs to third-party
destinations that sell products or services. The affiliate receives a commission
when the clickthrough results in a sale. Google’s guidelines require advertisers
to indicate in their ad copy if they’re engaging in affiliate marketing. To save
space, the aff abbreviation is often used.
Broad match: The default keyword-matching setting in Google AdWords. Broad
match displays your ad on search results pages that match your keywords and
a large peripheral universe of keywords that Google determines is relevant —
so your ads appear on the results pages of keywords you might not have
directly chosen. Broad match is an easy way to spread your ad out to keywords
that haven’t occurred to you. In choosing this option, however, you’re
relying on Google’s relevancy algorithm to choose keywords related to your
selections. (See also keyword-matching options, expanded match, exact match,
and negative match.)
Call to action: Google recommends using short phrases that command the
viewer to do something. These calls to action encourage clickthroughs with
phrases such as “Learn more,” or “Download now for free.” Some marketers
dispute the effectiveness of calls to action. A good way to test the value of
calls to action is to use multiple ads in an ad group, some with calls to action
and others without.
Campaign: The largest subdivision of a Google AdWords account, a Campaign
holds one or more Ad Groups. Campaigns can be paused, resumed, budgeted,
networked, and scheduled — these settings affect all Ad Groups simultaneously
and equally. Ad Groups have their own settings for finer control.
330 Building Your Business with Google For Dummies
Clickthrough: Clickthroughs occur when a viewer clicks your AdWords ad.
Clicking through generates a charge to your account.
Clickthrough rate (CTR): The CTR is a calculation of an ad’s clickthroughs
divided by its impressions (the number of times it’s displayed). CTR measures
the effectiveness of an ad.
Content network: Non-search-engine sites that publish Google AdWords
make up the Google content network. These sites participate in the AdSense
or premium AdSense programs. AdWords advertisers decide whether or not
they want to release their ads to this expanded network.
Content-targeted ads: AdWords ads targeted to the information pages of the
content network and distributed through Google’s AdSense program.
Control Center: The Control Center is the entire suite of ad-creation and
campaign-reporting tools located in Google AdWords.
Conversion: Conversion occurs when a site visitor performs an action
planned and desired by the Webmaster. In a business context, conversion
usually involves a capture of information (such as registering at the site
or joining a mailing list) or a transaction (such as buying a product).
In the context of AdWords, conversion is the final step of a successful
clickthrough.
Conversion rate: A calculation determined by dividing a site’s conversions by
AdWords clickthroughs. Conversion rate measures the success of an AdWords
ad and, ultimately, the return on investment (ROI) of the campaign.
Conversion tracking: A tool in the AdWords Control Center that measures
conversions resulting from ad clickthroughs.
Cost-per-click (CPC): The maximum or billable cost of a viewer clicking an
AdWords ad. In Google’s system, unlike competing systems (at the time of
this writing), actual CPC is often lower than the maximum CPC established
by the advertiser. Cost-per-click is assigned to an entire Ad Group, or to individual
keywords of that Ad Group, or both. You can think of your maximum
CPC as a bid for placement in the AdWords column.
Cost-per-thousand (CPM): A measurement of the cost for each thousand
impressions (displays) of an ad. CPM is not used in Google AdWords, which
employs a cost-per-click (CPC) system. However, some other search engines
sell advertising on a CPM basis.
Creative: The text copy of an AdWords ad. Google is reducing its use of
this word to describe ad text, but it remains in widespread use in forums
and articles about the AdWords program.
Glossary 331
Daily budget: Set at the Campaign level, the daily budget establishes a ceiling
on Campaign expenses. Google recommends a daily Campaign budget based
on projected impression frequency and clickthrough rate. The actual ceiling
is set by the advertiser.
Destination URL: Not necessarily visible in the ad, the destination URL points
to the ad’s landing page.
Display URL: Visible in the ad, the display URL doesn’t necessarily match
the destination URL. The main purpose of a different display URL is to
reduce the destination URL to a size that fits in the small ad box. The
shortened URL makes it easy for viewers to see the ad’s target site before
clicking.
Distribution preference: This setting allows the advertiser to release or not
release a Campaign’s ads to Google’s content networks.
Exact match: One of Google’s keyword-matching options, exact match forces
Google to display your ads only on search results pages that exactly match
your selected keyword or key phrase. Exact match may be selected for individual
keywords in an Ad Group. (See also keyword-matching options, broad
match, expanded match, and negative match.)
Expanded match: Expanded matches are variations of your selected keywords
(such as plurals, synonyms, and misspellings) that Google deems relevant and
helpful to your ad’s success. Expanded matching is included in the broad
match option. (See also keyword-matching options, broad match, exact match,
and negative match.)
Geo-targeting: Google enables advertisers to target ads by geographic region,
according to a preset list of countries, American states, and certain American
metropolitan areas. Geo-targeting works by identifying the searcher’s IP
(Internet Protocol) address, thereby locating the searcher geographically.
Geo-targeted ads are displayed only to searchers viewing Google in the targeted
area.
Google advertising network: The total reach of Google AdWords, consisting
of Google.com, Google Groups, the Google Directory, and Froogle, plus its
search partners (AOL Search, Netscape, AskJeeves, and others), and the
Google content network of AdSense sites.
Impression: A single ad displayed on a user’s screen.
Keyword: The specific word combinations and phrases users search on and
advertisers bid on.
332 Building Your Business with Google For Dummies
Keyword Suggestion Tool: This interactive tool is Google’s in-house keyword
generator for AdWords users. The Keyword Suggestion Tool spits out long
lists of words and phrases related to a selected keyword.
Keyword-matching options: Google offers four keyword-matching options
for expanding or restricting how your ads match keyword searches. These
options are broad, expanded, exact, and negative. Refining the keywordmatching
options can turn around a faltering campaign.
Landing page: A Web page represented by the destination URL. The landing
page usually seeks to convert visitors to customers.
Negative match: This option prohibits an ad being displayed once a negative
term has been applied. (See also keyword-matching options, broad match, exact
match, and expanded match.)
Optimization: In the context of Google AdWords, optimization has nothing to
do with Web site design (see Chapter 4). AdWords optimization is about the
distribution of multiple ads in an Ad Group. Google tracks the relative success
of ads and manages their rotation accordingly. This optimization can be turned
off by advertisers who prefer a random rotation of ads in an Ad Group.
Overdelivery: Overdelivery refers to Google’s optimization allowance. In the
Terms of Service agreement, Google is permitted to exceed your daily budget
by 20 percent but must reconcile this overdelivery of ad impressions (and
resulting clickthroughs) every month. Your monthly budget, which is determined
by multiplying the daily budget 30 or 31 times, can’t be overcharged.
Furthermore, if Google overshoots the daily budget by more than 20 percent,
it issues an overdelivery credit for the additional clickthroughs.
Paid placement: Search result listings paid by sponsors, these listings might
be indistinguishable from index results. Some search engines accept paid
placement as a form of advertising, but Google does not.
Pay-per-click (PPC): Pay-per-click is another term for cost-per-click (CPC).
Phrase match: One of Google’s four keyword-matching options, phrase match
forces Google to restrict the placement of your ad to search results pages that
exactly match your key phrase, including matching the word order. Other
words might be included in the user’s keyword string, but the exact phrase
specified in your phrase match must be present.
Return on investment (ROI): A general business and advertising term,
return on investment measures the profitability of a campaign. Simplified,
ROI calculates a formula by which expenses are subtracted from sales to
measure revenue gain. As an AdWords measurement, ROI is about conversions
exceeding clickthrough expenses.
Glossary 333
Rotation: Rotation is the formula by which multiple ads in an Ad Group are
selected for display. In Google, rotation may be random or optimized.
Start and end dates: Google enables AdWords advertisers to determine in
advance the start and end dates of a Campaign.
Traffic Estimator: The Traffic Estimator is an indispensable tool in the
AdWords Control Center that enables advertisers to gauge the clickthrough
rates of individual keywords.
AdSense Terms
Ad layout: An ad configuration for AdSense publishers. Google offers ten ad
layouts; you can choose horizontal or vertical layouts containing one, two,
four, or five ads. AdSense publishers cannot alter the configuration of ads
within the bars and banners that constitute ad layouts, but they may change
the colors in which text and borders are displayed.
Ad unit: One set of AdSense ads displayed in an ad layout.
AdSense code: The snippet of HTML and javascript that Webmasters paste
into their pages to begin serving AdWords ads.
Alternate ads: AdSense publishers may specify non-Google ad sources for the
space occupied by an ad unit, in preparation for those occasional times when
Google can’t deliver ads. Once specified, the alternate ad source is bundled
into the AdSense code, and the replacement of Google ads by alternate ads
occurs automatically if Google has no relevant ads to serve.
Banner: One type of ad layout. Three banners are available; one vertical and
the other two horizontal. Each banner contains multiple ads.
Button: A type of ad layout that holds a single ad.
Clickthrough rate (CTR): Calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the
number of displays (impressions). AdWords advertisers are charged for clicks
through their ads. AdSense publishers are paid for clicks through the ads they
host, sharing the revenue with Google.
Color palette: Individually adjusted colors for each of five elements in AdWords
ads: headline text, ad text, URL text, border, and background. Google supplies
several preset color palettes.
334 Building Your Business with Google For Dummies
Content-targeted advertising: The generic name for Google’s distribution
of AdWords ads to AdSense sites. The AdSense network is also known as
the content network. The word content is important in this context because
Google uses its analysis of an AdSense page’s content to determine which
ads should be served on it.
Cost-per-click (CPC): A monetary amount charged by Google, and paid by the
advertiser, when a user clicks through an ad. Advertisers bid for placement by
offering a maximum CPC per keyword; Google charges the minimum amount
beneath that amount (called the actual CPC) required to hold the best possible
page position for the advertiser. AdSense publishers are paid an undisclosed
percentage of the actual CPC.
Cybersquatting: The practice of unfairly capitalizing on ownership of a domain
name that infringes a trademark or copyright. Google doesn’t allow AdSense
publication on a cybersquatting Web page.
Destination URL: An underlying URL in an AdWords ad that specifies the destination
of clickthroughs. The destination URL is not necessarily the same as
the URL displayed on the ad (called the display URL). When you set up a URL
filter, the destination URL is blocked.
Distribution preference: Set by AdWords advertisers to include, or exclude,
the content network of AdSense sites. AdSense publishers run AdWords ads
only when those advertisers opt to have their ads appear on content pages.
Double serving: The practice of placing AdSense code in more than one
location on a single page. Doing so violates Google’s terms of service and
is grounds for a warning and possibly expulsion from AdSense.
Impressions: Ad displays. AdSense measures and reports the impressions of
all your ad units.
Inline rectangle: A type of ad layout meant to be placed within bodies of
text, not in sidebars. Google offers four configurations of inline rectangle.
Leaderboard: A type of ad layout featuring four AdWords ads arranged horizontally.
Leaderboards are designed to be placed at the top of Web pages but
can be placed anywhere on the page.
Public service ad (PSA): Used to fill an AdWords ad before an AdSense site is
crawled for the first time or if topical relevancy can’t be established for some
reason.
Publisher: An AdSense account holder and operator of a content site.
Glossary 335
Skyscraper: A vertical arrangement of ads. Two skyscrapers are available,
one holds four ads and one holds five.
Towers: All the vertical ad layouts: two skyscrapers and one vertical banner.
Towers are usually placed on AdSense pages in the sidebars.
Typosquatting: The practice of purchasing and capitalizing on a misspelling
of a prominent domain name, such as googal.com.
URL filter: A means of blocking specific AdWords ads from displaying on
an AdSense site. This feature is normally used to prevent competitors from
advertising on your site, taking away your visitors. Webmasters need to know
the destination URL of any ad to block it.

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SEO Terms

Above the fold (ATF): Originally a newspaper term, above the fold means on
the top half of the page. Placing a story above the fold makes it more visible.
In Web publishing, in which no fold exists, premium placement generally
means toward the top of the page, in a position where visitors don’t have to
scroll down. Screen resolutions differ, of course, so if you design your page
using a resolution of 1280 x 1024, for example, your own fold is way down the
page. The higher the resolution, the more material you can put into each
“fold” portion of the page, because high resolutions make text and graphics
smaller. (In effect, high resolution makes the screen bigger.)
For years, I optimized my page design with the assumption that my visitors
were viewing the site on a 640 x 480 screen. I now regard that resolution as
sufficiently obsolete to upgrade my optimization to 800 x 600 screens, which
are still prevalent on laptops. (My apologies to 640 x 480 users, who must
scroll vertically and horizontally at my sites.) Keeping all this in mind, and
perhaps viewing your pages through different resolutions, try to place your
most magnetic content so that it’s visible without scrolling.
Backlink: A link at another site, leading to your site. Also called an incoming
link. The number and quality of backlinks represent the most important factor
in determining a site’s PageRank. The value of any backlink is determined
partly by the PageRank of the linking site, which is determined partly by the
quality of its backlinks, and so on.
Bridge page: See doorway page.
Cloaking: A type of search-engine subterfuge in which an indexed Web page
is not shown to visitors who click its link in Google (or another search engine).
The cloaking works two ways: Visitor content is cloaked from Google, and
Google’s indexed content is cloaked from visitors. This serves to give a high
PageRank to content that ordinarily would rate a low PageRank. Cloaking is
not always illicit. A certain type of cloaking are used to deliver pages tailored
to a visitor’s ISP (America Online, for example) or specific Web browser.
Crawler: See spider.
Cross linking: Intentionally or unintentionally, cross linking creates large
backlink networks among sites that exist in the same domain or are owned
by the same entity. Unintentional cross linking happens when a site generates
a large number of pages with identical navigation links or when at least two
sites mutually link related content. When cross linking is done intentionally,
the Webmaster is seeking to raise the PageRank of the involved sites. Excessive
cross linking can backfire. If Google decides that the resulting enhanced
PageRank is artificial, any or all of the sites might be expelled from the
Web index. Innocent cross linking between two related sites is usually not
a problem.
Deepbot: The unofficial name for Google’s monthly spider. Freshbot is the
unofficial name of Google’s frequently crawling spider. The official name for
both crawlers is Googlebot.
Domain: The first- and second-level address of a Web site. Top-level
destinations are defined by the domain extension: .com, .net, .org,
.biz, and others. The second level adds a domain name: yoursite.com.
Domain name: The second-level domain address that identifies and brands a
site, such as google.com and amazon.com.
Domain name registration: The process of taking ownership of a domain
name. Registrations are processed by dozens of registrars approved by ICANN
(Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers). The cost of domain
ownership is no more than $35 per year. (Hosting the domain’s Web site is an
additional expense.) Registration takes place online, and the activation of a
new domain (or moving a domain from one host to another) generally requires
no more than 48 hours.
Doorway page: An entry page to a Web site, sometimes known as a splash
page. Doorway pages endure a negative connotation due to illicit techniques
that send visitors to an entirely different site than the destination they clicked
in Google.
Dynamic content: Web pages generated by an in-site process that depends on
input from the visitor. Most dynamic content comes from a database operating
behind the scenes, feeding information to a Web page created in response to
a visitor’s query. Search engines are among the largest producers of dynamic
content; every Google results page, for example, is pulled from the background
index in response to a keyword query. Google’s spider generally avoids portions
of sites that rely on dynamic page-generation, making it difficult to index
the content of those sites.
326 Building Your Business with Google For Dummies
Entry page: See doorway page.
Fresh crawl: Google’s frequent scan of Web content that occurs between the
deep monthly crawls. Google does not publicize the schedule of its intermediate
crawls or its target sites. The term “fresh crawl” is an unofficial one used
by Webmasters, site optimizers, and other Google obsessives.
Freshbot: The unofficial name for Google’s near-daily spider. Deepbot is the
unofficial name of Google’s monthly-crawling spider. The official name for
both crawlers is Googlebot.
Googlebot: Google’s Web spider.
Incoming link: See backlink.
Index: In the context of Google, the index is the database of Web content gathered
by the Google spider. When Google receives a search query, it matches
the query keywords against the index.
Keyword: As an optimization term, a keyword represents a core concept of
a site or a page. The site’s content, HTML tagging, and layout strategies are
based on effective deployment of keywords, which could also be key phrases.
Google matches search results to keywords entered by its users and assigns
a PageRank in part on how consistently a site presents its keywords.
Keyword density: A proportional measurement of keywords embedded in a
page’s content. High keyword density focuses the page’s subject in a way that
Google’s spider understands. The spider can interpret too high a density as
spam, which results in a lower PageRank or elimination from the index. Most
optimization specialists recommend a density between 5 and 15 percent.
Keyword stuffing: The attempt to gain a higher PageRank (or higher ranking
in any search engine) by loading a page’s HTML code or text with keywords.
In most cases a visitor can’t see the keywords because they’re buried in HTML
tags, camouflaged against the background color of the page, or reduced to a
tiny typeface. Keyword stuffing violates Google’s guidelines for Webmasters
and can result in expulsion from the index.
Link farm: A site whose only function is to display outgoing links to participating
Web sites. Link farms are disreputable versions of legitimate, topical
link exchange sites through which visitors gain some content value. Link farms
often have no topicality and present no guidelines or standards of submission.
Google does not explicitly threaten expulsion for joining link farms, but it discourages
their use.
Glossary 327
Meta tag: Positioned near the top of an HTML document, the meta tag defines
basic identifying characteristics of a Web page. Often, several meta tags are
used on each page. In those tags you set the page’s title, description, and
keywords.
Mirror site: Mirror sites duplicate content and are used for both legitimate
and engine-spamming purposes. Legitimate mirror sites assist in downloading
when a great deal of traffic is trying to reach a page or acquire a file. Illicit
mirror sites attempt to fill a search results page with multiple destinations
owned by a single entity. When Google discovers a mirror site whose only
purpose is to dominate a search page, that site risks expulsion.
Optimization: A set of techniques to improve a Web site’s presentation to
visitors and its stature in a search engine’s index. As a specific field, search
engine optimization has suffered in reputation due to unscrupulous individuals
and companies using tactics that degrade the integrity of search results and
violate guidelines set by those engines. Generally, any optimization scheme
that tricks a search engine also tricks visitors to that site, making online life
worse for everyone involved. Pure optimization, though, helps everyone: the
Webmaster, the search engine, and the visitor. The true values of optimization
are clear content, coherent navigation, wide reputation for quality, and high
visibility in search engines.
Outgoing link: A link from your page to another page. Outgoing links don’t
build PageRank by volume, as incoming links (backlinks) do. However, Google
pays attention to the text elements of outgoing links, and a page’s optimization
can be strengthened by consistent placement of key concepts in that text.
Page redirect: A background link that sends site visitors to another site. Page
redirects can be used legitimately, as when a site moves from one domain to
another. In that scenario, the Webmaster sensibly keeps the old domain active
for a while, seamlessly sending visitors to the new location when they click the
old one. As an illicit optimization technique, page redirects deflect visitors
from the site indexed by Google to another site that would not be able to gain
as high a PageRank. This type of redirect, when uncovered by Google, risks
the expulsion of both sites from the index.
PageRank: A proprietary measurement of Google’s proprietary ordering of
pages in its Web index. PageRank is the most intense point of focus, speculation,
observation, and desire in the Webmaster and optimization communities.
More than any other single marketing factor, PageRank has the power to determine
a site’s visibility. A high PageRank moves a page toward the top of any
search results page in Google when that page matches the user’s keywords.
Obtaining a PageRank high enough to break a page into the top ten is the
primary goal of Google optimization. An approximate version of any page’s
PageRank can be checked by displaying the page in Internet Explorer while
running the Google Toolbar. Hover your mouse over the PageRank cursor to
see the current page’s rank on a 0-to-10 scale.
328 Building Your Business with Google For Dummies
Robots.txt file: A simple text file that stops Google (and other search engines
that recognize the file and its commands) from crawling the site, selected
pages in the site, or selected file types in the site.
SE (search engine): A site, such as Google.com, that matches keywords to
Web page content.
SEO (search engine optimization): SEO seeks to increase a site’s visibility in
search engines and enhance its value to visitors through topical page design,
consistent HTML tagging, and focusing content on core keywords.
SERP: Search engine results page. A page of links leading to Web pages that
match a searcher’s keywords.
Spam: Generally refers to repeated and irrelevant content. As an optimization
term, spam refers to loading a page with keywords or loading a search
engine’s index with mirror sites. Google reacts strongly to spamming, and
takes harsh measures against Web sites that use spamming techniques to
improve PageRank.
Spider: An automated software program that travels from link to link on the
Web, collecting content from Web pages. Spiders assemble this vast collection
of content into an index, used by search engines to provide relevant sites to
searchers. Spiders are also called crawlers, bots (short for robots), or Web
bots. Google’s spider appears in Webmaster logs as Googlebot.
Splash page: See doorway page.

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Ten Site Optimization Resources

with Google-specific
page optimizing. In this regard, most professional optimizers are one of two
types: general optimizers who work across the board or Google optimizers.
The truth is, optimizing exclusively for Google is needlessly fanatical. First,
Google doesn’t publicize its algorithm tweaks and the subsequent recalculations
of PageRanks and reordering of search results. Following a silent but influential
Google upgrade, wails of anguish from Webmasters around the world can
be heard as their sites drop from previously hard-won positions. As a community,
Google optimizers try to figure out what changed and how to reoptimize
their domains. This manic-depressive process is ongoing and necessary, but
it probably shouldn’t be the only page-tweaking task on your plate.
Second, and the main reason that general optimization is the way to go,
all important search engines respond well to the same basic optimization
improvements. If your site needs an optimization overhaul, chances are the
most basic spider-friendly improvements will dramatically raise your visibility
in Google — and in any other index that lists your site.
284 Part V: The Part of Tens
Hitch your wagon carefully
This chapter spotlights optimization sites, tools,
gadgets, and more. When following these suggestions
and exploring on your own, you’re bound
to encounter some strong come-ons from optimization
companies and specialists. SEO is a
competitive field, especially with the Google feeding
frenzy. Some optimization pitches resemble
get-rich-quick spam. Outlandish promises are followed
by unrealistic (and probably untrustworthy)
guarantees. However, I’m not one to throw
out the baby with the bathwater. (Who coined
that barbaric expression?) Plenty of great optimization
specialists are just a link away. You just
need to know the telltale signs to avoid.
Guarantees of any sort should set off alarms in
your head. Google’s indexing can lead to unpredictable
results — and no optimizer can seriously
promise a specific search ranking or ad position.
The more dramatic the guarantee, the less
you should trust it. Guaranteed number-one
placement on a search results page is frankly
absurd. You might indeed claim the top spot for
certain keywords, but don’t believe anyone who
promises you such a thing. Another enticement
is the promise of placement on the first page of
listings — this is both unrealistic and a bit sleazy.
The first results page in Google can be as short
as 10 listings or as long as 100, depending on the
user’s Preferences setting.
Automated optimization is troublesome. Certain
handy tools automate the creation of meta tags;
I cover these tools in this chapter and they’re
fine. Automated measurements — of keyword
density and crawler readiness, for example —
might or might not be accurate or helpful, but
they’re not dangerous. But automated rankchecking
engines violate Google’s terms of service
and can get your site into hot water.
Optimization is mostly a hands-on affair. Some
SEO companies sell software packages that
assist the process with a combined set of online
and offline tools. Various invasive elements can
be planted in your computer whenever you install
a new program, and I’ve never found it necessary
or desirable to employ desktop applications when
optimizing.
Speaking of automation, some companies offer
bulk submissions to hundreds of search engines.
According to traffic measurement statistics, more
than 95 percent of all search engine traffic
derives from a handful of top engines. Hiring
somebody to bulk-submit your site globally might
not be the best investment.
Link farming (see Chapter 3) is not optimizing. Be
wary of any SEO company that proposes mutual
links between its site and yours.
Finally, understand the difference between optimized
results and paid results. Some search
engines (not Google) accept fees for placement
in their search results (not off to the side). Nothing
is inherently unethical in this business model,
even though it did give the entire search industry
a bad reputation in the 1990s. But a lack of ethics
is at play when an optimization consultant spends
your money gaining paid placement in some
search engines instead of spending it working
up the Google results page. Sometimes this
strategy is used to fulfill a promise of top-page
search listing — a promise that should never be
made to begin with.
Google optimization, as a specific tactic, comes into play when a Webmaster
limits the entire marketing plan to Google. There’s nothing wrong with that at
Google’s current levels of traffic. (See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Google’s
competition and the prospects for the future.) Another example of Googlespecific
optimization is a highly optimized site that tweaks its page features
specifically to eke out better returns from Google. In both cases, optimizations
made for Google tend to help in other search engines, just as general
optimization helps in Google.
The resources suggested in this chapter fall into three categories:
 Do-it-yourself optimization. These sites offer tutorials, interactive tools,
directories, and other resources, some of which might cost money.
Don’t expect consulting, site management, or individualized optimization
reports.
 Don’t-do-it-yourself optimization. These companies and individuals cater
to Webmasters and businesses that don’t want to master optimization fundamentals
or plunge their hands into code and keywords. This category
also includes many of the questionable SEO practices that leverage their
clients’ naiveté and need to outsource, promising unrealistic results and
employing unwholesome strategies. At the same time, this space is where
you find the many honest, smart, and skilled optimization specialists who
can deliver personalized site evaluations for a reasonable cost, tighten
your code, deepen your keyword identity, and multiply your Googlederived
leads in a single crawl cycle. Don’t be afraid of SEO specialists;
just be cautious.
 Hands-on tools. Online gadgets! Keyword analyzers, meta tag generators,
page evaluators, and other interactive assistants populate this category.
These tools are for the do-it-yourself crowd.
Some sites cover all three bases. SEO specialists usually (but not always)
include some do-it-yourself content on their sites.
Search Innovation
www.searchinnovation.com
Search Innovation is a search engine marketing company with a strong optimization
streak. Two sections of this site generously provide information: the
Articles and Resources sections.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 285
The site’s articles, mostly written by founders Daria and Dale Goetsch, are
detailed, serious, and informative. These pieces cover such topics as effective
keywords, “organic” SEO (the practice of optimizing toward high placement
in search listings, as opposed to purchasing placement on search pages),
optimizing dynamic pages (a tricky subject many optimizers don’t go near),
link building, SEO myths, crawler methods, building site maps, writing effective
link text, and content writing.
The articles at this site are enough to get this site mentioned in this chapter,
but the Resources page shines just as brightly. Here you find a directory of
forums, newsletters, blogs, interactive tools, seminars, and Web sites that are
resourceful in other ways.
HighRankings.com
www.highrankings.com
Operated by Jill Whelan, an optimization consultant, the HighRankings site
is distinguished by a friendly atmosphere, a generous allotment of free articles,
a free, almost-weekly newsletter, and a discussion forum dedicated to
optimization.
The High Rankings Advisor newsletter, contains articles by Whalen and
guest writers. Many of these pieces are archived in the Advisor Articles
section; new and mid-level optimizers would do well to read through
the whole lot of them. The articles tend to be detail-oriented, with, for
example, entire tutorials devoted to a single meta tag. You can also find
great information about getting framed sites indexed in Google, submitting
to directories, and other basic tasks sometimes ignored by high-pressure
optimization shops. HighRankings.com maintains a vigorous do-it-yourself
sensibility, even as it offers site evaluations, writing services, and content
editing.
The discussion forum is possibly the most thorough and SEO-dedicated set of
message boards anywhere. This forum hosts well over 1000 topics and about
15,000 messages covering every possible aspect of site optimization. (See
Figure 16-1.)
Jill Whalen is an active participant and friendly moderator of the voluminous
Webmaster chatter. Conversations, like the articles, tend toward technical
details. Participants use the space to work out fine points of site coding, CSS
style sheets, supplementary programs that bundle code in spider-friendly
ways, strategies for organizing page elements at the code level, and so forth.
I recommend the HighRankings forum most highly to serious optimizers and
Webmasters at all levels who have questions.
286 Part V: The Part of Tens
Mediumblue.com
Newsletters and newsletter archives are a terrific resource for optimization
tips. Beyond the sheer informational value, receiving newsletters sparks
continued work on your site, reminding you that optimization is an ongoing
(frankly, never-ending) occupation. True, you can’t avoid repetition when
scanning dozens of articles, but sometimes we need to be nudged repeatedly
to do our online chores.
Medium Blue is an optimization and marketing consultancy with a free monthly
newsletter. Less chatty and varied than Jill Whalen’s High Rankings Advisor
(see the preceding section), the Medium Blue sheet is informative in its formal
way. Each newsletter is a single article utterly lacking in chatter, ads, links,
and other distractions.
Past editions are archived back to November 2001, forming a useful knowledge
bank covering subjects as diverse as keywords (of course), evaluating site performance,
monitoring search engine positions, long-term techniques to attain
high rankings, and site traffic analysis. Broad rather than detailed, the articles
don’t divulge finicky matters of HTML tagging or keyword density. One
newsletter from 2003 contains an interview with the founder of Wordtracker
(see Chapter 4).
Figure 16-1:
The High-
Rankings.
com forum
is the most
impressive
discussion
area for
search
optimization
topics.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 287
Keyword Verification and
Link Popularity Tools
This section spotlights a few interactive tools. These pages don’t provide optimization
tools per se, such as meta tag generators. Rather, these gadgets check
on the results of your optimization efforts in two areas:
 Keyword verification, which checks a URL’s presence on the results
pages of several search engines, when searching for certain keywords
 Link popularity, which checks the number of incoming links to a URL, as
viewed through multiple search engines
Marketleap Keyword Verification tool
www.marketleap.com/verify
Marketleap.com provides an integrated set of optimization checks. The two
tools described here are beautifully designed and create elegant displays of
results. These gadgets are free to use.
Figure 16-2 shows the Keyword Verification tool. It tells you whether your site
(or specific page) is returned in the search results of 11 major search engines
and, if so, on what search results page it appears. (The definition of a results
page is not provided; my experiments indicate that a page probably equals 10
results.)
Follow these steps:
1. Enter a URL.
If you’re checking an inner page of your site, you don’t need to enter the
full address of that page, although it doesn’t hurt to do so. Marketleap
finds inner-page matches to your keywords to whatever extent the tested
search engines can find them.
2. Enter a keyword or phrase.
Type whatever you’ve optimized for, as if a Google user were searching for
that phrase. You’re likely to get more encouraging results if you enter a
phrase, not a single word. Placing quotes around the phrase, for an exact
match to word order, creates more hits, but doesn’t necessarily create a
realistic report of your site’s visibility to the average Google user.
288 Part V: The Part of Tens
3. Enter the displayed access code.
Simply type the code that appears in colored letters. Forcing users to
replicate the code prevents this tool from being overused by automated
scripts.
4. Click the Generate Report button.
A moment after the results first appear, they’re redrawn in a table, as
shown in Figure 16-3.
Note in Figure 16-3 that some engines match your keywords with a targeted
inner page (in this example, the page that’s best optimized for the keyword
phrase), and other engines can’t see that deeply. Google has crawled the site
carefully, but AltaVista has not.
Marketleap doesn’t check any engines beyond the third page. If your page
doesn’t appear in the results table, the omission is not necessarily an indicator
that your page has not been crawled by that engine. However, it does indicate
that the page is not optimized powerfully for that engine. In the context
of this book, Google is the top priority, so all is well with the results shown in
Figure 16-3.
Figure 16-2:
The
Marketleap
Keyword
Verification
tool, ready
to search
the engines
for a site’s
visibility
against
keywords.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 289
Marketleap Link Popularity Check
www.marketleap.com/publinkpop
Marketleap’s second optimization tool measures your incoming link network
(see Chapter 3). In an attractive twist, this little engine also lets you compare
your main link with three comparison URLs, as shown in Figure 16-4.
Finally — and this goes above the call of duty — the results page fills in gaps
by supplying total incoming links for many other URLs, providing a broad
context in which to evaluate your site. The result can be discouraging, but
here goes:
1. Enter your site’s URL, and then enter three comparison URLs.
In both cases, enter the exact page you want to compare, with the
understanding that in most cases it should be the home, or index, page.
Most incoming links aim straight for the front door. However, if you have
been optimizing and networking an inner page, this is the place to check
out the results.
Figure 16-3:
Results
of the
Keyword
Verification
test. Some
engines see
the inner
page; some
do not.
290 Part V: The Part of Tens
2. Select an industry from the drop-down list.
This selection determines the nature of the fill-in sites that Marketleap
provides on the results page. The more accurately you choose the industry,
the more meaningful the context of your results.
3. Enter the access code.
Again, this step blocks automated scripts.
4. Click the Generate Report button.
Wait a few seconds for the results to appear on your screen. This tool is
usually slower than the Keyword Verification device.
Figure 16-5 illustrates a results table. You see only part of the table; the
comparison results continue down the page, ending with media juggernaut
CNN.com and its impressive 6.6 million backlinks.
Note that Google often shows fewer incoming links than the other four search
engines in the table. It can be a shock to think that your site’s hard-won backlinks
are incompletely represented in Google. Actually, Google doesn’t necessarily
divulge all incoming links in its index for a given page.
Figure 16-4:
The Link
Popularity
Check,
ready to
compare
the backlink
totals of four
sites in five
search
engines.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 291
Google excludes similar results, which, in many cases, means inner pages of
sites. Those inner pages might be in your own site, if you generate a lot of your
own incoming links (most sites do). Furthermore, Google (at its discretion)
excludes the display of incoming links with low PageRanks. The result of these
omissions can make it seem that other engines do a better job of assessing a
site’s backlink network. That might or might not be true in any given crawl
cycle. The more common truth is that Google withholds some results of some
searches using the link: operator. Google explicitly warns Webmasters not to
trust the link: operator (used here for Google’s column in the results table)
for a full backlink picture. The value of this table lies in the comparisons it
affords.
From the search results table, use the drop-down menu to run the search
again against a different industry.
Mike’s Link Popularity Checker
www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/link-popularity/
An alternative to the Marketleap tool described in the preceding section, Mike’s
backlink checker does not include results from HotBot but adds Teoma to the
mix. Google, of course, is included. The results are packaged in an attractive
Figure 16-5:
The Link
Popularity
Check
results
table. You
can search
again
against a
different
comparison
industry.
292 Part V: The Part of Tens
table, and several preset sites from diverse industries are checked along with
yours, for comparison, as shown in Figure 16-6. Google is one of those comparative
sites — notice that Google’s assessment of its own backlink network
is much lower than the networks of MSN, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista.
Mike’s backlink checker conveniently remembers the five URLs you last
searched. Each search after your first includes the results for your previous
five searches.
When you get to the page listed in the URL, scroll down a bit to find the Link
Popularity Check button and URL entry box.
TopSiteListings.com
http://www.topsitelistings.com/optimization.php
TopSiteListings is an optimization consultancy with an abundance of do-ityourself
information on the site. The preceding link leads you directly to a
section of the News & Article archive devoted to optimization.
Figure 16-6:
Results of
Mike’s Link
Popularity
Checker.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 293
These articles are for serious, technically minded Webmasters. The articles
don’t shy away from thorny subjects such as dynamic page optimization and
using your server logs as optimization indicators. Mathematical formulas are
sometimes used to convey a point. This archive might be the spot where you
find answers to nagging questions, such as how to optimize a graphical site
without devolving to all text, thus destroying its look and feel. TopSiteListings,
as a company, responds quickly to Google emergencies such as the late-2003
algorithm change that sent many top listings plummeting down the search
results page. Bookmark this page and check it often. New articles are posted
weekly, more or less.
SEO Consultants Directory
www.seoconsultants.com/
SEO Consultants is what it says it is, and more. Although the site focuses on
SEO issues, the company also consults on the larger field of search engine
marketing. The directory published at this site is excellent. Click the SEO
Resources button in the left navigation panel to get started.
This site provides a definite rarity: a Froogle optimization tutorial. Click the
Froogle SEO button in the left navigation bar. If that button doesn’t exist
when you read this, try the following link:
www.seoconsultants.com/articles/1383/froogle-optimization.htm
Search Engine World Tools
www.searchengineworld.com/misc/tools.htm
Search Engine World is a terrific search marketing resource that every
Webmaster should know about. Here, I want to point you to three tools
related to optimization.
Webpage Size Checker
You don’t need a special tool to see the file size of your Web page; a quick
glance on your hard drive can tell you that. But this gadget gives you more
than just the raw file size, as shown in Figure 16-7.
294 Part V: The Part of Tens
Below the Total WebPage Size in the results table are three related statistics:
Visible Text Size, Size of HTML Tags, and Text to HTML Ratio. In Figure 16-7,
you can see that the text in the HTML tags (all of which are listed below the
table) outsizes the text on the page body by more than two to one. Troubling?
Well, it depends on the page’s intent. Low text-to-HTML ratios often indicate
pages hosting many links, because links take up a lot of HTML space. So a
directory page, for example, should have a low text-to-HTML ratio.
The next three statistics in Figure 16-7 are also related to each other: Number
of Images, Largest Image Size, and Size of All Images. From the standpoint of
usability and optimization, you want these numbers to be low: few images
(because the Google crawler doesn’t understand what the images are saying),
small images, and low total size of images (for the user’s benefit when loading
the page).
Sim Spider
Sim Spider presents a view of any Web page as a search engine spider sees it.
Spiders also crunch the page down into a compressed index form, which you
don’t see.
Figure 16-7:
The
Webpage
Size
Checker
results.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 295
Figure 16-8 shows what Sim Spider looks like after it has finished surveying
a page. The illustration shows only a small part of a moderate-sized page.
Beneath the text summary is an inventory of every link on the page. You can
launch a Sim Spider crawl through that link with a single click.
Keyword Density Analyzer
The Keyword Density Analyzer, shown in Figure 16-9, is frequently used by
Webmasters who optimize. This famous, indispensable gadget crawls whatever
page you put into it and computes the frequency with which your chosen keywords
appear on the page. Keyword density is usually regarded as a crucial
optimization consideration. Generally, the more dense, the better. This means
that the more instances of your keywords on the page, the more readily Google
can understand what the page is about and rank it accurately. However, too
many mentions of a keyword can be interpreted as spam by Google, serving
to lower the page’s rank rather than raise it.
Figure 16-8:
Sim Spider
results,
summarizing
a Web page
with all formatting
and
graphics
removed.
296 Part V: The Part of Tens
Figure 16-9 shows this tool just before launching a search. Note the following:
 It is important to include the page title, meta keywords, and meta description
in the analysis. Remember that the density should be much higher
in those fields.
 The default word length is set to four letters and above; this is reasonable.
I’ve never changed it.
 Using the stop word list prevents small words from mucking up your
results. Click the stop word list link to see a complete list of excluded
words.
 For a general analysis of every word that appears on your page, select
the radio button next to Ignore the following word list. To analyze specific
keywords, select the radio button next Include only the following word
list, and then enter your keywords in the box.
Figure 16-10 shows the keyword density results. Note that the engine analyzes
all possible variations of your keywords, even if they make no sense. Those
tables can be ignored.
Figure 16-9:
The
Keyword
Density
Analyzer
before
launching
an analysis.
Chapter 16: Ten Site Optimization Resources 297
JimWorld
www.jimworld.com
Another articles-and-forums site, JimWorld is stronger in the latter department.
A slim but useful selection of articles leads to a fine optimization forum
featuring four major discussion areas and about 60,000 messages divided into
some 8000 topics. Registration is free.
Figure 16-10:
A Keyword
Density
analysis.
298 Part V: The Part of Tens
Finding SEO forums
Optimization results are hard-won, involving
fastidious work and patience while waiting for
its rewards. Community forums are wonderful
places for would-be and experienced optimizers
to visit. Finding a home in one or more of
these forums gives you someplace to go when
you need a question answered. Beyond that
convenience, the message boards make good
and informative reading.
The best communities maintain a topical focus
broader than just site optimization, ranging over
the spectrum of search engine marketing. Here
are two that cover optimization issues within
their diverse marketing topics:
 www.webmasterworld.com
 www.ihelpyouservices.com/forums
Eric Ward
www.ericward.com/articles
Eric Ward is a link-building specialist, and this site is a must-bookmark for any
Webmaster who focuses on the networking aspect of Google optimization.
Because Google plainly states that backlink networking is the single most
important factor in PageRank, every Webmaster should be concerned with
incoming links. An astonishing persistence of focus on backlinks creates the
most concentrated resource site on this crucial topic I’ve ever seen. Tons of
articles explore every angle of creating backlinks. Legal issues of deep-linking
are covered. Guest writers contribute generously.
SEO Directory
www.seolist.com
This optimization directory seeks to be a topical link farm, but that aspect
isn’t as important as its articles. The site is young, and the selection of articles
is a bit sparse. Let’s hope it grows with an emphasis on the editorial side.

Read More......

Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue

AdSense is a new program, and a simple one. Starting up is easy (see
Chapter 12), and there’s no risk. You can’t lose money publishing
AdWords ads. The worst that can happen with AdSense is that you make no
money. I’ve never heard of anyone making absolutely no money — not a
single clickthrough; not a penny earned. Even one low-revenue click through
an ad on your page is an encouraging sign that the program works. This chapter
is about getting more clickthroughs.
Improving your AdSense performance involves mostly optimization and
design issues. It’s vital to remember that providing incentives to click your
AdSense ads, or merely pleading for clicks, violates the AdSense terms of service
and can easily get you kicked out of the program. Relevancy drives
clicks. Google’s job is to provide relevant ads, and your job is to focus your
page’s topic clearly so Google can do its job.
This chapter is also about eliminating competition from your pages (or
making a business decision to not eliminate it) and setting up alternate ads —
the two account features not covered in Chapter 12.
230 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Optimizing Your Site for AdSense Success
Success in the AdSense program depends on several factors, most of which
are under your control. To get clickthroughs, you need
 Traffic
 Relevant ads
If nobody is visiting your site, you obviously won’t get clicks. If you have traffic
but your ads aren’t relevant, your visitors won’t feel motivated to click
them. You might think that it’s Google’s responsibility to send you relevant
ads (especially since I stated exactly that in the introduction to this chapter),
but successful AdSense publishers take responsibility for relevancy by giving
Google a clearly optimized site to work with. Optimization works both ends
of the equation, helping you attract more traffic while helping Google provide
relevant ads.
Briefly put, site optimization for search engines (usually called search engine
optimization, or SEO) is a bundle of writing, designing, and HTML-coding
techniques with two goals:
 Creating a more coherent experience for visitors
 Improving the site’s visibility in search engines
The two goals are tied together by Google’s primary mission to provide good
content to its users. Google strives to reward visitor-friendly sites with high
placement on its search results pages — taking into consideration other factors
as well. If you haven’t read Chapter 4, this is a good time to soak up its
elaborate tutorial in site optimization. That chapter is geared to improving
your site’s stature in Google, building PageRank, and climbing up the search
results page — all to the purpose of attracting traffic.
Promoting your site on other related sites is a tangential aspect of optimization
but a pertinent part of traffic building. Building a network of incoming links is
the most potent way to improve your PageRank in Google (see Chapter 3 for
much more about this). Building links is important also to your success with
AdSense. AdSense revenue benefits from all the normal ways that enterprising
Webmasters promote their online businesses.
Now, on to relevancy. Relevancy converts visitors to clickthroughs. Ironically, a
successful conversion sends the visitor away from your site, which might seem
counterproductive. Never mind that for now; if your site provides good information
value, your visitors will come back. Later in this chapter I describe how
to keep them anchored on your page even when they click an ad.
It’s no surprise that the AdSense program is much beloved by Webmasters running
information sites, as opposed to service, subscription, or transaction sites
that generate nonadvertising revenue. Information sites are often labors of
love, having been constructed from the ground up out of passion for the subject.
When AdSense burst on the scene, these hard-working, under-rewarded
folks began experiencing Internet-derived revenue for the first time. In those
cases, AdSense is the only source of site income. More established media sites
that build AdSense into the revenue mix are sometimes surprised to find it contributing
a larger-than-expected portion of income. No matter what your site’s
focus or scope, cleanly optimized content delivers more pertinent ads and
higher clickthrough rates.
The following is an AdSense-specific checklist of optimization points:
 Have only one subject per page. Get your site fiercely organized, and
eliminate extraneous content from any page. Don’t be afraid to add pages
to accommodate short subjects that don’t fit on other pages. Let there be
no question as to what a page is about.
 Determine key concepts, words, and phrases. For each page, that is.
Then, make sure those words and phrases are represented on the page.
Pay particular attention to getting those words into headlines. Your concentration
of keywords should be skewed toward the top of the page.
Don’t go overboard; your text must read naturally or your visitors (and
Google) will know that you’re spamming them.
 Put keywords in your tags. Take those keywords and phrases from
the preceding item and put them into your meta tags (the keyword,
description, and title tags). See Chapter 4 for details. Don’t use any
word more than three times in any single tag.
 Use text instead of images. Google doesn’t understand words that are
embedded in images, such as what you often seen in navigation buttons.
(Navigation buttons and other images are important in defining the subject
of the page and the site.) Replace the buttons with text navigation
links.
Try to fulfill these points before opening an AdSense account. Ideally, your
site is in its optimized state when Google first crawls it. You don’t know how
often your site will be crawled in the future, so getting properly indexed the
first time is key.
These optimization points apply more to home-grown information sites than
to database-driven media sites, such as online editions of newspapers, where
content deployment is determined by offsite editorial determinants. An online
newspaper follows the news, not the other way around, so the topicality of a
page might be torn apart by diverse stories. But even sites that drop in their
content from offline sources (such as reporters in the field) can optimize
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 231
232 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
their subject categories by organizing site structure along topical lines whenever
possible. Keeping to shorter pages of focused content encourages
AdSense success.
So far, I’ve discussed optimization as it applies to sites already built and operating.
Such optimization is largely about defining your subject by keywords,
and putting those keywords into the page’s content and tags. Taking the
reverse approach is also possible: developing a site around keywords that
lead to a high-revenue AdSense account. That approach, which I cover later
in the next section, is trickier. The middle ground between optimizing a built
site and building an optimized site is adding pages to an existing site without
betraying the overall topicality, primarily to enhance AdSense revenue. Keep
reading to explore both these possibilities.
Shooting for More Valuable Ads
It’s no secret: All AdSense ads are not equally valuable. The value of any ad
displayed in your ad unit depends primarily on what the advertiser bid to put
it on your page, in its position in the Ad Group. That bid is the most that the
ad can be worth to both you and Google; Google might, in fact, charge the
advertiser less, depending on mathematical considerations I describe in the
AdWords chapters. And whatever the ad is worth to you and Google combined,
it’s worth less to you alone. You don’t know the percentage of its total
value that you receive per clickthrough, and you don’t know the overall value
in dollars and cents, either. That’s a lot of not knowing. Here’s the formula:
Advertiser’s bid minus Google’s discount to the advertiser minus Google’s
portion of the revenue split
With all this subtraction, it’s amazing that AdSense pays out at all, but it does.
Some of those advertiser’s bids are sky-high (and the AdWords bid market is
inflating all the time), and Google’s split with AdSense publishers appears to
be generous. Still, AdSense publishers who keep an eagle eye on their reports
quickly learn that some clickthroughs are worth much more than others. That
means that some ads are more valuable than others. Ideally, you want the
most valuable ads to appear on your pages.
To some extent, the relative value of ads you receive is a factor out of your
control. The best you can do is optimize each page to most clearly convey its
topic and run the ads Google sends. But you can travel down two other
avenues in the quest for more valuable ads:
 Start a new site
 Create new pages optimized for more valuable ads
The first option is not a possibility for Webmasters who are not devoted fulltime
to their Internet businesses. Even if they are working full-time online,
their hands might be full with properties they already run.
I must also point out that Google discourages building a site solely as a vehicle
for AdSense, but does not outright forbid such a site. Google looks for
quality content, regardless of its motivation. If you slap up nearly blank pages
with keywords stuffed into the meta tags, and start running AdSense ads on
them, Google will likely shut you down. (That means closing your entire
AdSense account, eliminating AdSense on any legitimate properties you
might be running.)
Dire consequences notwithstanding, there isn’t much difference between
a new site designed for AdSense and a long-running site that just joined
AdSense, if both sites have substantial and worthy content. A new genre of
Web site has started to appear, optimized for valuable AdSense ads and created
to earn AdSense revenue. If the content is good, nobody is harmed by
this scenario. Visitors enjoy a positive site experience; advertisers receive
high-quality clickthroughs; the AdSense publisher builds revenue; and Google
maintains the integrity of its value chain. It’s all about content and relevancy.
Identifying high-value keywords
So, looking back at those two methods of attracting high-value ads, the point to
remember is that the processes are identical. Whether starting a new site or
spinning off new pages, pulling more valuable ads from Google is accomplished
by identifying high-value keywords and optimizing new content around those
keywords. That’s a densely packed concept, so let me unwind it:
 The value of keywords is determined by advertiser bids on those
keywords.
 High bids for certain keywords represent an advertiser’s wish for a top
position on search results pages as well as on content pages.
 Clickthroughs on ads associated with expensive keywords cost advertisers
more, and yield more to AdSense publishers, than clickthroughs on
less valuable ads.
 AdSense publishers can use a variety of tools to determine the relative
value of keywords.
 Given the same number of clickthroughs, optimizing content around
expensive keywords versus less expensive keywords leads to higher
AdSense revenue.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 233
234 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
For existing sites, building new content optimized around high-value keywords
is a three-step process:
1. Identify current keywords.
These keywords are the core concepts of your page(s), which might or
might not be incorporated in your meta tags and embedded in your page
text.
2. Research related keywords.
Keyword research is . . . well, key to the whole Google ad game, for
advertisers and AdSense publishers alike. Your goal is to find keywords
that advertisers are bidding up. See the tip after this list for two interactive
tools that uncover this vital bidding information.
3. Build content around high-value keywords.
Building content is easier said than done. Writing and assembling page
content that keeps visitors coming back is a long-term process. For
existing sites, the issue might be one of reorganizing existing content to
optimize pages around high-value keywords.
The two biggest providers of pay-per-click search engine advertising, Google
and Overture, both provide on-screen tools for determining the relative value
of keywords. Using Google’s Traffic Estimator is more work than using
Overture’s Bid Estimator and yields less explicit results. However, the results
are more pertinent because you’re trying to attract high-value Google ads,
not Overture ads. Successful AdSense publishers put themselves in the mindset
of an AdWords advertiser. Achieving that state of mind is best accomplished
by opening an AdWords account and using the Keyword Suggestion
Tool and the Keyword Estimator. There’s no cost or obligation in opening an
AdWords account. See Chapter 7 for complete instructions.
Making the most of AdWords tools requires a certain amount of savvy. Figure
13-1 illustrates the Traffic Estimator. You can see that certain keywords generate
more clicks per day than others, meaning they are more popular search
terms. You can also see that a relatively high cost-per-click (such as 38 cents
for the keyword ipod) yields a lower ad position than a less expensive keyword
(such as imusic). By inference, you know that ipod is a more valuable
keyword than imusic, and if you create a content page optimized for ipod it
will probably pull more valuable ads than if you optimized for imusic.
Overture provides a more direct view of comparative keyword value. Follow
these steps to view Overture bid amounts:
1. Go to the Overture site at www.overture.com.
2. In the search box, type a keyword.
3. On the search results page, click the View Advertisers’ Max Bids link,
near the upper-right corner.
The View Bids window pops open.
4. Type the security code in the provided box.
This little speed bump prevents automated access of Overture’s Max
Bids features. Entering the code assures Overture that you are a human.
5. Click the Search button.
As you can see in Figure 13-2, Overture displays its advertisers’ ads for the
keyword you entered, listed in descending order of bid amount. This remarkably
public disclosure of what companies pay for their Overture ads does not
necessarily correlate with Google bid amounts, which are probably higher.
But it does give you a basis for comparison, especially if you repeat the
process with related keywords. (You can launch a new search directly from
the results window.) A recent search revealed a top bid of 40 cents for the
keyword ipod, and no bids at all for the keyword imusic, confirming the inference
of Google’s Traffic Estimator.
Figure 13-1:
The Traffic
Estimator
in the
AdWords
account
infers the
relative
value of
keywords.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 235
236 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Keyword-bid research isn’t of much value, however, if you can’t think of
related keywords. Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool (in the AdWords
account) creates spectacular lists of related keywords, and is free to use
after opening an AdWords account. Overture provides a similar service, at
this URL:
inventory.overture.com
Figure 13-3 illustrates the results of Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool.
Notice that in addition to spitting out a list of related terms, Overture divulges
the search count for each term and presents the list in order of search term
popularity.
Wordtracker is another popular keyword suggestion tool, with added features
that calculate how popular the keywords are as search terms in various
search engines. The service is located here:
www.wordtracker.com
Wordtracker does not attempt to gauge bid value. The service is used by
advertisers and site optimizers to target subject niches. I discuss Wordtracker
comprehensively in Chapter 3.
Figure 13-2:
Overture
divulges its
inventory of
ads for
search
terms and
the amount
the advertiser
bid
for that
keyword.
Conceiving and building high-value
AdSense pages
After you’ve identified high-value keywords, you need to find ways of extending
your content to those key concepts without damaging or diluting your
site’s focus. If you operate a directory of bed-and-breakfast establishments,
for example, you don’t want to spin off pages about iPods just because of
their high keyword value. You might want to start an entirely new site about
iPods and digital music, but that’s a big project. The goal here is not mindless
opportunism. The goal is content management that leverages the best keyword
value that can legitimately be applied to your site.
Although it’s valuable to think like an AdWords advertiser and use the
AdWords tools, remember that your priorities are the opposite of the
advertiser’s priorities in one respect. The advertiser seeks niche categories
represented by highly targeted keywords over which there is little bidding
competition. The ideal keyword is used as a search term by a specific demographic
of searchers and has been overlooked by other advertisers. The
AdSense publisher, conversely, seeks broad categories represented by highdemand
keywords over which there is a great deal of competition. The ideal
keyword is both hugely popular as a search term and in demand by other
Figure 13-3:
Overture
offers
related
keywords
and their
popularity
as search
terms,
which
implies
relative
value.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 237
238 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
advertisers. The advertiser’s pain (high bid expenses to hit the desired
market) is your gain (high clickthrough revenue).
Creating higher-value pages from an existing site is often a matter of generalizing
from the specific. Returning to the bed-and-breakfast directory, whose
pages might naturally be optimized for the keyword phrase bed and breakfast,
the Webmaster could realize that hotel is a more valuable keyword. In
Overture, bed and breakfast draws a high bid of $0.35, while hotel enjoys
stronger demand with a high bid of $1.04. These numbers don’t speak for the
bid amounts in Google AdWords, but what does it matter? The Webmaster
never knows the absolute value of any ad on the page; only relative value
matters. With this awareness, the Webmaster might create a page optimized
in part for hotel.
High value is not necessarily the point. Capturing previously disregarded
value is also important. As an AdSense publisher, look at all your pages. If
you see the same ads on many of them, Google is perceiving your pages as
similarly optimized. There’s nothing wrong with topical consistency across
the site, but from an AdSense perspective that consistency is inefficient. Ad
replication can work for you and against you. Multiple impressions can
impose awareness of the ad on your visitors, motivating clicks that might not
occur with single impressions. At the same time, you risk annoying visitors
with repeated ads and encouraging “ad blindness,” in which visitors reflexively
block out ad displays. At the very least, you’re losing revenue by not
exploiting ads that would be drawn to topical pages related to, but different
from, your main pages. Continue adding content pages, with an eye to distinguishing
their keyword optimizations.
Improving Clickthrough Rates
Whatever your site’s level of traffic, clickthrough rate (CTR) is the determinant
of AdSense success. All AdSense Webmasters should monitor the clickthrough
rate in the account performance chart and watch its fluctuations.
Divulging any site’s CTR is a violation of Google’s terms of service, so a discussion
of specifics is out of bounds here. Shooting for a standard of excellence
isn’t the point in AdSense; improving CTR and maintaining that level is.
Remember, do not raise your CTR artificially. This is serious business; Google
will close accounts if it detects CTR mischief. Artificial clickthroughs mean
wasted advertiser money and the destruction of value in the AdWords program,
over which Google is fiercely protective. Playing it safe is the only way,
so avoid these three false types of clickthrough:
 Clicking your own ads
 Telling friends to visit your site and click ads
 Promoting ad clicks on your Web page
Fortunately, you can try a number of legitimate tactics to raise your CTR.
Experimentation is key. The only way to know what works for your site is to
try both sides of a strategy. The more traffic your site attracts, the more
quickly you can evaluate your CTR experiments.
Placing ads above the fold
You are concerned with the highest fold point. The lower the screen resolution,
the higher the fold point. Visitors running a monitor resolution of 640 x
480 pixels see very little of your page without scrolling. Most Webmasters no
longer design for 640 x 480 viewing, but 800 x 600 is widely in use, and that
resolution, too, has a high fold point. If you normally view your site with
higher resolutions, the advice here is to drop down to lower rez and see
where your ad units appear.
Horizontal ad layouts are far easier to squeeze above the fold than vertical
layouts that stretch down the page. (See Figure 13-4.) Some AdSense veterans
recommend against horizontal layouts for reasons I discuss a bit later. If you
choose a skyscraper ad unit, running down the page vertically, try to place
the first ad, at least, above the fold (see Figure 13-5).
Figure 13-4:
Believe it or
not, this
page is
running
AdSense
ads. The ad
unit is below
the fold of
an 800 x 600
screen.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 239
240 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Choosing your pages
Leaving behind the fold issue, another consideration is which pages should host
your ads. There is logic to thinking that you might as well code ads into every
page of your site. Indeed, if you use templates that establish the unchanging
elements of all your pages, it might be difficult to keep ads off individual pages.
But two tactics for enhancing your AdSense presentation come to mind.
First, consider eliminating ads from your index page — the first page of your
site. The rationale here is that an ad-free opening page welcomes your visitors
and won’t get their defenses up. The phenomenon of ad blindness can be
instilled on the home page and persist as the visitor moves through the site.
Eliminating ads from the index page makes your ad units stand out more in
the inner pages.
Ad-free index pages don’t work for all sites. If your index page is the highestranked
entry page and exit page, the index page is your main chance to generate
clickthroughs; if visitors exit the site from that page anyway, you might
as well lure them into exiting through your ads. Check your traffic logs.
Figure 13-5:
A vertical ad
layout,
pushed high
up on the
page, where
two full ads
are visible
above the
800 x 600
fold.
Now look at the Infoplease.com site, shown in Figure 13-5. That figure illustrates
one of the main inner pages of the infoplease domain. If you visit infoplease.
com, you see that the home page doesn’t run AdSense ads, though it
does sprout display banners and pop-ups. While not presenting an ad-free
environment by a long shot, the busy index page prepares visitors for the
quieter presentation of AdSense ads displayed on the inner pages.
Another strategy of great interest and potential is to limit ad displays
to boring and post-conversion pages of the site. Boring pages? Is it blasphemy
to suppose anyone’s pages are boring? Not at all. By “boring,” I
mean lacking in substantive content. Registration confirmation pages, for
example, contain little information. The same is true of post-download
pages. These pages represent lulls in the site experience during which the
visitor might be attracted to an AdSense ad as the most interesting content
on the page. Since many of these “boring” pages are presented after the
visitor has been converted in some way (signing up for a newsletter, for
example, or registering at the site), getting a clickthrough at that point is
icing on the cake, turning otherwise useless pages into revenue earners.
See the sidebar titled “An experiment with exit pages” for a real-life success
story using this strategy.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 241
An experiment with exit pages
Manuel Lemos operates an information and filedownload
site at www.phpclasses.org
focused on the PHP programming language. He
is an AdSense publisher. In trying to juice up his
clickthrough rate, Lemos experimented with a
placement strategy using primarily exit pages.
This is his account: “I formulated a thesis that
stated that if, on interesting content pages the
users tend to ignore the ads, the ads would be
more efficient on pages that would be less interesting.
To test the thesis, I figured that the less
interesting pages would be the exit pages. A
quick look at my site statistics showed me that
typical exit pages are the download pages. The
user’s tendency is to come to the site, check the
new components, and download them if they
are interesting. So I created new pages with
statistics of the files being downloaded and
placed ad units on them.
“The thesis turned out to be correct. These
pages have typical clickthrough rates that are
three or four times greater than content pages.
Users usually wait some time to download the
files, and while waiting they stare at the page a
bit. When the downloads end, users usually
leave the site because they got what they
wanted. At that time, they often click on the ads
on the page.”
242 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Fighting ad blindness
Ad blindness affects content providers in all media. I read The New Yorker
magazine, and occasionally I’m startled to realize that the outer borders are
filled with ads that I block out of my perception. Television, of course, suffers
badly from not only ad blindness but ad walkaway and ad skipthrough, both
of which are a sort of self-enforced blindness. On the Internet, banners at the
top and sides of pages have accustomed the online citizenry to advertising
and created an immunity to it.
AdSense ads enjoy a threefold advantage over banner advertising that helps
them overcome ad blindness:
 Text ads look different than banners.
 Google ads are more relevant to the page’s content than most banner ads.
 Google ad colors can be customized to blend in with the page, appearing
almost as part of the editorial content.
Despite these advantages, visitors can get used to your ads and stop noticing
them. In a way, Google contributes to the problem by conditioning a huge percentage
of the online population to AdWords ads in Google. No doubt many
Google searchers contract AdWords blindness. On the other hand, Google has
also enlightened the Internet citizenry to the possibility and potential of highly
relevant advertising that doesn’t flash, pop up, or balloon across the page.
Searchers who have discovered good experiences clicking AdWords ads in
Google are likely to extend the expectation of a good experience when they see
AdWords ads on your page.
Four factors affect the ad blindness quotient of your site:
 Display location
 Color coordination
 Repeating ads
 Ad layout type
My purpose here is not to make hard-and-fast recommendations about where
your ads appear, what colors you use, or which ad layout is best. Opinions in
the AdSense community vary on these questions. I do think it’s important to
be aware of the factors under your control and to experiment. I also make the
following general recommendation regarding ad blindness: Don’t get into a
rut. Many AdSense publishers find that their clickthrough rate degrades over
time. If traffic remains steady, this distressing CTR phenomenon can easily be
attributed to visitors getting so used to your ads that they simply don’t see
them. When this seems to be the case, the antidote is to shake up your
AdSense presentation with new locations, new colors, new layout types, and
(this is more difficult) new ads.
In the previous two sections I discuss display location in a few respects:
placing ads above the fold, omitting ads from the index page, and concentrating
ads on exit pages. Although those sections are not presented in
the context of ad blindness, the location of ads certainly is part of the
problem. Now I want to move on to issues of layout type and customized
colors.
Fighting ad blindness with the right ad layout
In this section and the next, we move into the realm of subjectivity. No fast
rules apply to ad layout. You must balance two considerations, which don’t
always agree:
 What looks best in your page design
 What works best in your page design
By “what works best,” I mean what delivers the best clickthrough rate.Google
gives you four basic ad layout choices:
 Horizontal: Leaderboard and banner (see Figure 13-6)
 Vertical: Skyscrapers, also called towers
 Button: Two styles containing one ad each
 Inline: More rectangular than horizontals and verticals (see Figure 13-7)
Note that despite terminology that includes the words “banner” and “button,”
both of which imply graphic ads, all Google ad layouts contain identically formatted
text ads. Check out all available layout formats here:
www.google.com/adsense/adformats
One school of thought believes that leaderboard and banner layouts should
be avoided, because the Web’s history of banner advertising has blinded visitors
to the horizontal format. Also, Google uses vertical layouts for the most
part on its pages, acclimating users to seeing AdWords displayed in a tower
format. Thus, deviating from established success is risky. Arguing against
that viewpoint is the mandate to place ads high on the page, which is easier
to do with a horizontal layout.
Google’s ad layouts use inflexible dimensions and can stretch your table cells
to an accommodating size. This factor is a special issue with the leaderboard
horizontal layout, which is 728 pixels wide. Placing that wide unit into a narrower
table cell can widen the entire table beyond its original dimensions.
Such enlargement can be a problem for pages optimized for unscrolled viewing
at the 800 x 600 resolution.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 243
244 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Figure 13-7:
The inline
rectangle ad
layouts are
meant to be
inserted
in a block
of text.
Figure 13-6:
Google
provides ten
preset
horizontal
and vertical
ad layouts,
some of
which are
shown here.
You must discover through trial and error whether vertical or horizontal
layout works best for you. Consensus is evenly divided on the matter. Design
considerations play a part in the decision; if you don’t have free sidebar
space for a tower above the fold, you might feel forced into a leaderboard or
banner. The rectangular inline layouts work well in wide blocks of text; the
text flows around the ads. (See Figure 13-8.)
The two button options provided by Google are new layout choices, and
interesting ones. (By publication time, these single-ad buttons were not in
wide use.) Their advantage is clear: Such a small layout footprint is easy to
position all over the page. Their disadvantage is likewise obvious: With only
one ad to click, you reduce clickthrough opportunities. On the other hand,
people don’t always respond well to multiple choices, so a single, pointed
advertisement might work well in your user demographic. Are you getting
the idea that AdSense success is more art than science? Actually, in the true
spirit of science, AdSense responds to experimentation.
In the quest to reduce ad blindness, variety is key. Run different layouts
on different pages, and change each page’s layout from time to time. Track
performance in your AdSense account, and shake things up when your CTR
drops.
Figure 13-8:
Wide text
wraps
around
inline
rectangles.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 245
246 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Fighting ad blindness with the right colors
Just as ad layout issues split opinion in the AdSense publishing community, so
does custom coloring of the ad unit. Many Webmasters simply don’t bother
with the detailed HTML tweaking necessary to fully integrate an ad unit into
the look-and-feel of the host page. Others deliberately let their ad units stand
out garishly on the page, to attract attention and defeat ad blindness. (Whether
garish ad displays defeat or encourage ad blindness is debatable.) And a small
minority of Webmasters carefully insinuate their ad units into the page design
until they are nearly indistinguishable from editorial content.
You have three basic customization choices:
 Don’t do anything. This is the choice of many Webmasters, and you see
a lot of the default Mother Earth palette in the AdSense network. (See
Figure 13-9.)
 Create custom palettes in the AdSense account. I describe how to do
this in Chapter 12.
 Fine-tune colors using HTML hex values. This option integrates ad units
into pages with complex designs or pages using background colors not
found in Google’s custom palette section.
Figure 13-9:
Many Webmasters
use the
default
color
palette.
Here, blue
ads contrast
with a redthemed
page.
Changing the colors of the ad unit is an acceptable alteration of the code, but
no other tweaking is allowed. Do not squash the ads, enlarge them, or attempt
to change the dimensions of the ad unit. Doing so violates the AdSense terms
of service.
To fully customize your ad unit colors, you need a reference source of hex
codes, which are six-digit numbers that pinpoint colors in HTML code. All
browsers understand hex code. If you use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what
you get) page builder, you can probably check the hex codes of the colors
on your page by looking at the HTML view of that page. When customizing
Google ad units, finding the page’s background color is especially important.
You can also use an online chart such as the one located here:
hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/reference/color_codes/
Each customized hex code is plugged into one of five lines of the Google
AdSense code. Here is an example of those five lines:
google_color_border = “25314C”;
google_color_bg = “25314C”;
google_color_link = “FFFFCC”;
google_color_url = “008000”;
google_color_text = “999999”;
You can recognize these color lines by the word color in each of them; that
word doesn’t appear anywhere else in the AdSense code. When you create a
custom palette in your AdSense account, Google fills in those lines with hex
code. Here, you’re manually changing the hex code to better match your page
design. Note that each line corresponds to a different element of the ad unit.
You can customize five elements:
 border refers to the bottom bar and thin border extending around the
ad unit
 bg refers to the background color of the ad unit
 link refers to the ad’s headline, which is linked to the destination URL
 url refers to the display URL below the ad text
 text refers to the one- or two-line (depending on the display) ad text
In my experience, altering the border and bg elements makes the biggest difference
when integrating ad colors with page colors. If you match both those
colors to the page’s background color, the ad unit seems to sink into the page.
Figure 13-10 illustrates a page displaying the AdSense banner layout, displayed
with the default Mother Earth colors. The border is light blue against the
page’s dark blue, and the ad background is white (although you can’t see this
in the grayscale screen shot). The ad unit stands out boldly against the page.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 247
248 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Figure 13-11 shows the same page with customized ad colors; the border and
background elements now match the page’s background color. The ad colors
in Figure 13-11 match the code in the example; the background color’s hex
code is 25314C. I altered the other elements too, but they don’t matter as
much. Making the border and background disappear into the page creates
the important effect.
Be creative! If you combine customized colors with a specially prepared table
cell, you can construct an ad display that blends in (and even enhances) your
page’s look-and-feel, while subtly calling attention to the ads. Figure 13-12
shows such a page; the ad unit sits in a specially built table cell with complementary
colors. The ad’s headline color matches the background color of the
column below, and the background color exactly matches the overall black
background of the page.
The question remains: Do slickly customized ad units work as well as uncustomized
units? That question can be answered only by experimentation on a
site-by-site basis. If your site pulls extremely relevant ads, and your visitors
respond to ads best when they seem to blend into editorial content, customize
away. If you prefer grabbing your visitors’ attention forcefully, perhaps the
ugliest possible ad display works best for you.
Figure 13-10:
Uncustomized
ad units
stand out
boldly from
the page.
Figure 13-12:
The ad unit
blends into
the page
yet looks
distinctive,
thanks to
color management
and a
special
table cell.
Figure 13-11:
A customized
ad
unit, with
border and
background
colors
matching
the page’s
background,
seems
to sink into
the page.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 249
250 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Don’t be afraid to mix customized ad units with uncustomized units on the
same site. (Only one ad unit per page, of course, per the AdSense terms of
service.) Remember, part of defeating ad blindness is surprising your visitors’
expectations.
When CTR doesn’t matter
Some AdSense publishers don’t give a hoot about
CTR. To them, it’s all about total revenue. This
approach works well when the Webmaster adds
new pages regularly. If the CTR slips downward,
the deficit is made up by higher click volume.
Rob Arnold, Webmaster of www.linear1.
org, shares his experience:
“AdSense complements my content well. My
readers clearly find it useful; the clickthrough
rates reflect that. I had a significant body of text
to begin with, and coherent navigation and layout.
If you’re starting up a site you’ll need a few
hundred thousand words of content, organized
coherently, to achieve good results. I also spent
a short time in the early stages investigating the
impact of ad placement and color changes. But
what has proven to be the most effective use of
my time is producing quality content. If you can
add a page a day of quality content to your site,
that can matter more than tweaking your ad
layout or positioning.”
Rob Arnold’s total AdSense presentation includes
highly color-coordinated palettes and abovethe-
fold leaderboards, as shown in the figure.
Custom colors can make ad units blend into the
page as if they were part of the editorial content.
Filtering Ads
Understandably, you might not want to display AdWords ads from your competitors.
If you and your competitors operate information sites, the competition
doesn’t matter as much — if a visitor clicks away from you to a competing
site, you gain a bit of income without losing a sale. But if you sell products
through your site, losing a sale for a clickthrough might not be good business.
In that case, consider blocking your competitors’ URLs. This type of filtering
targets the destination URL of an AdWords ad, not the display URL. You have
two basic methods at your disposal:
 Make a list of your known competitors, and filter out their home-page
URLs.
 Systematically check the destination URLs of ads that appear on your
pages, and keep adding competing URLs to your filter list.
Your best bet might be to combine the two methods: Start with a known list
of competing URLs, and then keep your eye out for others.
When it comes to the easiest way of determining the destination URLs
of any ad unit, disregard the complicated procedure provided in the
AdSense Help section. Instead, just click the Ads by Google link at the
edge of any ad unit. (You can do this on any AdSense page, not just your
own.) A new browser window pops up with an explanation of AdWords
that includes the URLs of the specific ad unit you clicked, as shown in
Figure 13-13.
However you come up with your list — through your own knowledge of competitors
or by vigilantly watching your ads and clicking Ads by Google — use
the URL filter page in your AdSense account to maintain your list of blocked
URLs. Follow these steps:
1. In your AdSense account, click the Settings tab.
2. Click the URL filter link.
3. Click the Add/Edit sites button.
4. Type URLs into the box, one per line.
As shown in Figure 13-14, you add the URLs of sites whose ads you want
to block from your site.
5. Click the Save changes button.
New filters should take effect within a few hours of adding them to
your list.
Chapter 13: Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue 251
Figure 13-14:
Add URLs of
sites whose
AdWords
ads you do
not want
appearing
on your
pages.
Figure 13-13:
You can see
the destination
URLs
of specific
ad units.
252 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
When adding site URLs to your list, you can block the entire site by eliminating
the www. prefix. Using the www. prefix tells Google to block that distinct
page location, which is usually the index page of the filtered site. In that case,
AdWords ads that point to an inner page as the destination URL can still be
displayed on your sites.
Using Alternate Ads
In rare cases, Google can’t deliver ads to an AdSense page. You might want to
signify a stand-by ad source, or even a noncommercial image, to slip into the
spot normally occupied by Google’s ad unit. You may indicate that alternate
source at any time in the AdSense account. Here’s how:
1. In the AdSense account, click the Setting tab.
2. Click the Ad layout code link.
3. Scroll down to the Alternate Ads box, and enter the http:// destination
of your alternate ad or image source.
4. Click the Update code button.
5. Copy and paste Google’s updated script into your HTML document.
Even though the Alternate Ads box is located on the Ad Layout Code page,
along with choices of ad layout and palette, this setting has nothing to do with
the ad layout or palette. But you must make the settings of the Ad Layout Code
page conform to the ad settings used on your site page, so that the appearance
of your ad units doesn’t change when you paste the new code into your page.

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