Adsense Trusted Website

Optimizing Your Site for AdSense Success

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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
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.

Keyword Verification and Link Popularity Tools

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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.
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.

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.
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.

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.

HighRankings.com

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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.

Search Innovation

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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.
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.

AdSense for Search

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There was one more AdSense feature I needed to discuss. "Everything we've discussed so far about AdSense has been about placing ads on third-party Web pages," I said. "Google refers to this as AdSense for content, because it's all about Web-page content. This is the main AdSense program, the one that everyone uses." The three of them nodded their understanding.
AdSense for Search
Learn more about AdSense for Search at www.google.com/adsense/ws-overview.

"There is a second AdSense program available," I continued, "called AdSense for search that appeals to a more limited audience."
"Is it for other search engines?" Anita asked.
"No," I answered. "In fact, one of the conditions of joining the AdSense programwe'll get to those shortlyis that you don't display ads on any search-result pages you might have on your site. In other words, you can't compete with Google's bread and butter, however minuscule that competition might be, and use Google to make money at it."
"I guess that makes sense," Anita said. "So what is AdSense for search, then?"
"AdSense for search is about getting your visitors to use Google for their searching," I explained. "If you direct your visitors to Google's search engine, Google is willing to share some of the advertising revenue with you. Joining AdSense for search gives you the right to display a Google search box on your site. Visitors who enter queries into that search box are sent to a custom Google search page. The search page displays your logo and displays search results generated using the Google search engine. Search-related advertisements are displayed prominently at the top of the page. Just as with AdSense for content, you make money if visitors click those ads."
Claude wasn't sure what the benefit of this program was: "Why wouldn't the visitors just go to www.google.com or use their browser's search box? I normally use the Google Toolbar for my searching."
"Because it's a simple way for visitors to search your site," I explained, "not just the Web. It's not a great money-maker for most sites, but if you want to add searching capabilities to your site without having to do any programming, it's an easy way to do it. We'll talk a bit about it later, but really most of our focus is on AdSense for content. I'm just mentioning it because it's an interesting and underused feature."

Blogging for Money

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The Web was able to grow quickly because it was built on simple standards. A moderately technical person could download, install, and configure the necessary software in a matter of hours. Web browser software is now bundled with every new computer. Operating systems like Linux and Mac OS X even include built-in Web server software."
"One more thing, then," Claude continued. "Can you tell me the difference between a Web site and a blog? Stef's been telling me that I should 'get with it' and create a blog since I spend so much time on the computer anyhow." Stef is Claude's daughter, who attends a local college.
"When it comes right down to it," I continued, "a blog is just a set of frequently and easily updated pages on a Web site. The term blog is short for weblog, a type of online diary or journal. For some people, their blog is their entire Web site. For others, a blog is just one component of the Web site. Does Stef have a blog?" Claude indicated that she did. "Then I'd love to talk to her about it. The more advanced features of a blogletting readers post comments, tracking references by other blogsrequire the installation of special software on the Web server, so many bloggers let blogging services like LiveJournal or Bloggerwhich, incidentally, is owned by Googlehandle the technical details for them These services can host a blog for you on their own Web sites, but most can also publish the blog over to a Web site that you control. I'd be curious to know how she set up her blog."

The Web Address

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Every public Web site has a Web address that distinguishes it from other sites. The address includes a host name and a domain name. The host name is the name of the computer on which the Web server software runs. The domain name is the public name for a group of computers.
For example, the Web address www.EricGiguere.com has the host name www (for World Wide Web) and the domain name EricGiguere.com. In some cases, the address includes additional information after the domain name, but usually the host name and domain name together are enough to locate a Web site. The host name is important when there are two or more Web servers in a domain, but can normally be dropped otherwise. By convention, the primary Web site in a domain uses the special host name www.
Your site will need a Web address, so you'll need to obtain a domain name. Finding the right name is harder than it seems. Ideally, the domain name will directly relate to your site's content, because AdSense uses the Web address as one of its inputs when it tries to figure out what your site is really aboutso choosing a good name is important.
History of the Web
An excellent and authoritative history of the Internet and the World Wide Web can be found on the Internet Society's site, www.isoc.org/internet/history/.

The Web Server Makes It Public

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The Web server is a software application that exposes a Web site for others to see. You can't have a Web site without a Web server, because the server is what a browser communicates with in order to fetch Web pages. Without the server, your Web site is just a bunch of files sitting in your computer that only you can access.
Unlike a Web site, a Web server is complicated to set up and (especially) to maintain. In fact, there are all kinds of reasons not to run the Web server software yourself, even if you're technically inclined. I'll get to that later, but consider this: If I don't run a Web server, why should you? Let someone else run the Web server for you on their own computer. This is called Web hosting and it'll get your site up and running a lot faster than setting up your own Web server.
Web Server Confusion
Sometimes Web server refers to the physical computer that the Web server software runs on, as opposed to the software itself. To avoid this confusion, I always say Web server to refer to the software and server computer to refer to the computer on which the Web server runs.

From Web Page to Web Site

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Once you have a Web page, you can build a Web site. Let me repeat this point, because I want to emphasize it: If you can build a Web page, you can build a Web site. A Web site is just a set of pages that share a common Web address. In other words, the Web site is where the Web page "lives," so to speak, on the Internet.
Although single-page Web sites definitely exist, most sites have multiple pages, often hundreds or thousands of them. But such sites are built one page at a time, so don't feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of you. If you can find time to create one or two pages a week, you'll have 50 to 100 pages on your site in a matter of months. Not that you have to wait that longyou can start making money with your site with just a few pages.
No Programming Required
The kind of Web site you're going to build doesn't require any programming. In technical terms, it's called a static site because the Web pages hardly ever change. By contrast, a dynamic site has pages that change, either because the content is updated from a database or because the content is generated by small computer programs that vary the material depending on the viewer. Sites like www.amazon.com make extensive use of dynamic page generation.

The Ads

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I routinely check my AdSense account, even on weekends, because one of the great features about AdSense is that revenue is tracked by the system as it happens, with very little delay. That Saturdaytwo days after the Vioxx recall and one day after I had written the parodyI made just over $26 from the ads on my site.This was a much higher value than normal for my site.
As it turns out, one of the tongue-in-cheek "predictions" I had made had come true. In the parody, I had a so-called "industry analyst" (whose name is actually an anagram for what do I know) talk about the impact of the Vioxx recall on Google's revenues:
"Google's revenues might actually increase because now a lot of lawyers and consumer advocacy groups will start buying ads urging people to sue Merck. Lawyers are willing to pay a lot to find the right people to file for class action suits. This could actually be a short-term bonanza for Google."
This particular prediction was right on the money. Almost overnight, law firms had started placing Vioxx-related advertisements. They smelled opportunity (expensive litigation) and were looking for potential clients. And they were willing to pay to get to them. As I discovered, the lawyers were paying Google several dollars per click, an unusually high amountper-click fees of between 5 and 50 cents are the norm. The Vioxx recall was definitely good for Google, and, by extension, good for me!

Who Cares about My Pages?

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Why would an advertiser deal with anyone other than the big sites? There are a few good reasons, in fact:
Not everyone visits the big sites.
The big sites are expensive advertising venues.
Ads on big sites are aimed at broad segments.
But no advertiser can afford to place ads on millions of small Web sitesit's just too much work. Even dealing with the big sites is a hassle. That's why advertisers use advertising services like Google's AdWords or Yahoo!'s Overture.
"It's all about finding the right audience," I explained to Claude. "If your pages attract a segment of the population that advertisers want to target, even if it's a small segment, they'll be interested. But they want the advertising service to find that segment for them. That's where Google's AdSense program comes in."
Perhaps an analogy would help my case. "Look at the economy," I continued. "There are many more small businesses than big businesses, but big business gets all the press and publicity. Yet small businesses employ as many people as big businesses and account for most of the long-term job gains, according to government statistics. You don't have to be big to make a difference. Most sites on the Web are small. That doesn't make them unimportant or uninteresting.

Monitor and Update the Pages

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The final step is to monitor and update your Web pages on a regular basis. This is the easiest step to perform, but it's an important one you want your visitors to keep coming back. If they see that your pages are current, that the content changes in regular and interesting ways, they're more likely to come back. You want them to come back. You want them to link to your pages from their own pages. You want them to tell others about your pages. Making sure your pages are always available and are always up-to-date will make this possible.
Monitoring your pages can also help you create new content. With a bit of work, you can usually figure out which search terms visitors are using to find your site. These termsand some of them may surprise youwill suggest topics to focus on when creating new pages or updating existing pages.

Why AdSense?

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While it's true that AdSense is just one advertising system, it offers a number of advantages over most of the others. Not only is there no cost to join it, it's also available to almost anyone with content on the Web. The ads are primarily text-based (image-based ads are also available as an option) and come in a wide variety of formats for placement on your pages. The ads are also drawn from the same large pool of advertisements shown by Google on its own search pages. Finally, the automated page analysis ensures that the ads displayed on your pages are relevant to the content of those pages

Drive Traffic to the Pages

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The third step is to increase the number of visitors, or traffic, to your pages. Just showing ads isn't enough: in most cases, you only make money when visitors click on the ads, and the ads will be clicked by only a small percentage of your page visitors. Increase the number of visitors, and you'll increase the number of clicks.
This step sounds simple, but it's not. In fact, driving traffic to your pages is the hardest step of the process. With so many Web pages out there, the chances that someone will stumble upon yours by accident are small. Your best bets for traffic are to generate good word of mouth and to get your pages higher in Google's page rankings

Show Ads on the Pages

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The second step is to show ads on those Web pages. Viewing Web pages doesn't usually cost the reader anything. Few sites can get away with charging for access to their materialthere's simply too much competing material already freely available on the Web.
If you can't charge for access to the material, how do you make money? It depends on the nature of your pages. If you're running a business that sells products or services, then the pages are indirect moneymakers. They're a marketing expense, a cost of doing business. But you don't have anything to sell. Or do you?
Well, actually, you doyou have space on your Web site. You can make money by selling parts of your Web pages as advertising space. This is the same way that newspapers and magazinesthe classic pre-Web content servicesmake most of their money.
Sample AdSense Ads
If you'd like to see sample AdSense ads based on any URL or keyword, try Digital Point Solution's handy Sandbox utility at www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/.

Google makes this step easy. Once you've created your Web pagesor at least some of themyou join Google's AdSense program. Google will read the pages you made, analyze the content that's on them, and use that analysis to select ads that are relevant to the content of the page. All you need to do is insert some Google-supplied codedon't worry, there's no programming involved, just cutting and pastinginto the pages. If someone clicks an ad on one of your pages, Google gives you a cut of the per-click fee they charge advertisers. And it's all automated, even the ad selection

Create Some Web Pages

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The first step is to create some Web pages. Don't look so dubious Web page creation is not as mysterious as it seems. The basics are easy to understand, and there are many tools (both free and commercial) available to help you. What's hard is coming up with the content for those pages.
When you think about it, the Web is all about content surfing the Web is just looking for stuff. With billions of pages out there, the competition for a surfer's attention is very stiff. The better your content, the more unique and useful it is, the better your chances that others will find it. That's why I'll be discussing creating good content finding something to say and saying it well before getting into the mechanics of actually creating Web pages

Keyword Matching Options

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AdWords offers a number of keyword matching options. Understanding these options can help to improve the relevancy of your ad placement, leading to fewer ad impressions but a higher CPC.
The keyword matching options are:

Broad match
This is the default option. When you enter a phrase such as sail boat, ads will appear when a user's query contains sail and boat in any order in any part of a query, possibly along with other terms. In addition, broad-matched ads will also show for expanded matches, which are matches with plural (or singular) and other variant forms of the words in a phrase.

Phrase match
When you enter your keywords in quotes for example, "sail boat" your ad will appear when a user enters the search phrase in order as it appears within the quotes, but possibly with other words as well, for example, big sail boat.

Exact match
Exact matches are the least flexible kind of keyword matching. The term that users search for must exactly match the phrase you enter in brackets for example, [sail boat]in order, without any additional terms. Exact matching is the most targeted option among experienced AdWords managers because users searching for terms that make this kind of narrow match are more likely to be interested exactly in your business's offerings.

Negative keyword match
Negative keywords are added to a search phrase, by adding a minus sign in front of the negative keyword, to make a search more precisely targeted. For example, if you target sail boat -blue, your ad will appear when a user searches for sail boat, but not blue sail boat. Negative keywords are an important mechanism for making targeting more precise.

How Your Site Appears to a Bot

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To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for "robot").

To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.

Syndication Feeds

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As you may know, syndication is a simple XML-based mechanism for publishing content. Syndication feeds come in two predominant flavors: RSS and Atom. From the viewpoint of publicizing your web site, you don't need to worry about the differences between them.
Content is syndicated by encoding it within an RSS or Atom feed. This feed canand usually doesinclude links to the site originating the content.
Subscribers can view syndication feeds in all different kinds of software, including web browsers, email clients, standalone programs, and on HTML web pages. There's no mechanism built into syndication to pay for subscriptions, but once you are subscribed your feed display is automatically updated when a new item is added to the feed. It's up to the syndication-viewing software to decide how to render feeds, but software that can display web pages often shows the underlying pages to which the feed links.
There's some controversy about how publishers can best use syndication feeds, since it's not obvious how to make money from them. (Google has introduced a program allowing publishers to insert contextual ads within syndication feeds, but this is a controversial step.)
However, syndication feeds work well as a device for driving traffic to a site because:
Feed content is under the control of the publisher.
Most feeds contain items that are thematically linked (and can be related to a site).
Feed items provide content along with links back to more content on a publisher's site.
It's easy to distribute a syndication feed.
In other words, many savvy web publishers use syndication feeds as a kind of teaser for their real web content

Finding Sites to Make a Link Request

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To find sites that are appropriate for an inbound link request, you should:
Consider the sites you find useful, entertaining, and informative
Use the web taxonomic directories to find sites in your category and in related categories (See "Working with Directories," earlier in this chapter)
Use specialized searching syntax to find the universe of sites that search engines such as Google regard as "related" to yours
If you've looked carefully at Google search results, you may have noticed a Similar pages link
The Similar Pages link is supposed to show you more pages like the one the link modifies. How well it works varies widely (it works better on popular, highly ranked pages and less well on obscure pages). But it can give you some leads.
You can bypass the process of clicking Similar Pages by using the Google related: operator followed by a web page directly in a Google search. For example, entering the following Google search:
related:www.bearhome.com

is comparable to clicking the Similar Pages link for www.bearhome.com (and shows exactly the same web pages as the search result).
If you find it easier to analyze data presented visually, a demonstration tool called Google Visual Search, provided free by Anacubis, may be right for you. Anacubis's Google Visual Search Tool , http://www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google, uses the Google Web APIs to (among other things) present a visual representation of the sites similar to yours. For example, Figure 2-9 shows a visual representation of sites that are similar to http://www.mechanista.com, a site about antique typewriters, calculators, and other mechanisms

The Best Inbound Links

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The bestmeaning most likely to drive trafficinbound links come from:
Sites that publish content that is complementary and related to the content on your site
Hub sites that are a central repository, discussion area, and community site for a particular interest group (for example, a mention on SlashDot [http://www.slashdot.org]) can drive huge amounts of traffic to sites related to technology, so much so that the phenomenon of a sudden uptick in traffic due to inbound links has become known as the "Slashdot Effect"

Becoming Popular

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Sometimes it seems like all of life has the same themes as high school: what's important is being popular. A significant measure of popularity on the Web is how many inbound linkslinks from other sites to your siteyou have.

Obtaining inbound links is not rocket science, but it is labor-intensive and does require some thought. The best way to get another site to link to your site is to ask for it, as obvious as that may seem.

It makes sense for sites to link to your site when they have similar or related contentalways assuming the webmaster in charge of the site linking to you likes your content. This is a reasonable thing for the webmaster in charge of the other site to do because it adds value for the other site's visitors. (If your site is not adding value, you might want to rethink its premise.)

Submitting Your Sites to Search Engines

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Google and most other search engines use several separate mechanisms:
A program that crawls the Web to find sites, also called a crawler or a spider. Once found (crawled), sites are placed in the search engine's index.
Software that ranks sites in the search engine's index to determine their order of delivery when someone uses Google to search for a particular keyword or phrase.
To start with, if your site hasn't been found, you won't be ranked by a search engine at all (to state the obvious). So the first task is getting your site into the systems of Google and other search engines.

If you have inbound links links to your sitesfrom other sites in a search engine's index, then the search engine's spider will find your siteeventually. But why not see if you can speed the process up?

The rub, of course, is that by submitting a form to a search engine there is no guarantee if, and when, your sites will be included by a given search engine. The best approach is to list your site using the search engine's procedures, and check back in six months to see if you are included in the search engine's index. If not, submit again. In other words, this is a process that requires patience and may produce limited resultsbut at least the price is right!

Summarizing, search engines find the web pages they index by using software to follow links on the Web. Since the Web is huge, and always expanding and changing, it can be a while before this software finds your particular site. Therefore, it's smart to speed this process up by manually submitting your site to search engines

Naming Your Site

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If you haven't already picked a name for your web site, try to select a name that helps to tell your story. Good names, at least with a .com suffix, are hard to find these days. It's worth working hard to find the right name.
The Cult of Personality
Life writ large with the cult of personality might well describe the times we live in. Paris Hilton, an heiress with an apparently vacuous personality, has a television show, and is famous, because (and not despite) of that vacuous personality. I think the reality is that Paris is a great deal smarter than she seemsalthough another moral you can certainly draw from the Paris Hilton success story is that sex sells.
My point is that people, particularly celebrities, get attention these days. If you have celebrity, have access to celebrities, or have ideas about how to create celebrity, I say: "Go for it! Milk it!" And don't forget to mention your web site.
It's reasonable that people should be interested in people. People are interesting. As the poet Alexander Pope said a long time ago, "The proper study of mankind is man." (If Pope had included both genders, we moderns could surely go along with this.)
It's really very simple. Getting web site traffic requires publicity. Publicity is best generated using stories about people, particularly interesting or notorious people. If your web site has an interesting story about people, let others know about it (perhaps using a press release). Your people story will draw traffic.

Ideally, a site name, as I mentioned, should tell, or evoke, the story of your site and be memorable. Consider these classics:
Amazon: the world's greatest river meets the world's largest inventory.
eBay: I don't know why this one works, but it does.
Google: a very big number fits with the very large quantity of information Google indexes

Creating a Checklist

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In addition, your plan should provide a checklist with specific "to do" itemsessentially, all of the techniques used to create online publicity described in this chapter. The list should also include offline marketing and publicity placements appropriate to your target audience and your story.
Successfully getting online publicity and generating traffic is largely a matter of focus and keeping track of the details. Creating a checklist as part of your plan will help you make sure that none of these details fall through the cracks.

Popular Sites: Using Alexa

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I've already mentioned Google as an example of a site with broad traffic. There are, of course, many others. If you are curious, you can go to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com, which monitors both how much traffic a site gets and the relative increase (or decrease) in site popularity.
Where Does Content Come From?
No, content doesn't grow on trees. Content is a valuable commodityand perhaps more than a commodity. Great content is wonderful and unique, and not fungible.
Communities can supply a great deal of content if you have an idea for a good framework that will entice contributions about specific subjects.
If you are a writer, you can create content yourself. (Maybe this is the time for your inner writer to finally come out!)
Site owners can hire writers, either as employees or freelancers, or with a profit-sharing arrangement.
You can often pick up the rights to publish material on the Web that was originally created for a book, magazine, or newspaper very inexpensively. Content creators may be placed to let you use their content simply in exchange for publicityin the form of an author credit as an expert and/or a link.
You also might check out book and literary agencies. Some of them run a sideline business supplying aggregated recycled content and represent whole groups of writers.
So even if you aren't confident that you can personally create valuable content, don't despair: there are many inexpensive ways to publish valuable content without writing it yourself.
Don't underestimate the value of resource pages as content. A simple page of links to sites related to a specific subject (for example, sites of interest to collectors of antique typewriters and calculators) may draw traffic if the links are accurately described, kept up-to-date, and expanded when new relevant sites are opened.

On the Alexa site, click on the Top 500 Sites tab to see an ordered list of the most highly trafficked sites, updated daily. The most trafficked sites according to Alexa are shown in Figure 1-1.
Alexa's Movers and Shakers, shown in Figure 1-2, is also interesting. This snapshot of the "right here and now" Web is useful for seeing if there are any Web-wide trends in action, and also for learning about the kinds of exogenous events that move large-scale web sites up and down the chutes and ladders of popularity.
Although it is probably unrealistic to expect that you or I will be piloting sites that are the top of Alexa's list, it is worth spending time learning about popularity on the Web if you want to build successful sites. Alexa provides the tools you can use to see for yourself what is trafficked and what is gaining or losing among top-ranked sites.

You can also use Alexa to see traffic statistics for sites that are not in the top 500. For almost any site that has been around a while, Alexa will give you an idea of traffic statistics and whether it is gaining or losing traffic.

Alexa works by collating results from users throughout the Web who have installed the special Alexa Toolbar. (If you'd like, you too can install the Alexa Toolbar and help with popularity statistics.) There's some question about the statistical validity of Alexa for less trafficked sites because of this method of gathering dataAlexa's results are probably skewed towards users who are already web savvy and heavy users.
Most likely, Alexa's results are not very meaningful for sites that are ranked below 100,000 in popularity (very roughly, with fewer than 10,000 visitors per week).
The Alexa ranking of 100,000 or lower is also a great divide: if your site is in the top 100,000 you have content that many advertisers will consider worthwhile. Being in the top Alexa is a pretty good goal for your web site or sites: you can make real money from a top 100,000 site; it is an ambitious goal, but attainable.

Useful Free Services and Software

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TinyURL , http://tinyurl.com, provides a practical and very useful (but simple) service: it allows you to convert long, unwieldy URLsfor example, like those you often see from Amazon.com when you select an inventory itemto short, convenient URLs that are easy to use in HTML code (and easy to enter in a browser). Astoundingly, this service is free. Last time I looked, TinyURL had more than 185 million hits a month. Talk about traffic!
In part, a service like TinyURL works to generate ad revenue because it is so targeted. If you go to the site, you'll find Google AdSense content ads for things like DNS (Domain Name Server) services and software that fixes technology problems with browsers. In other words, technology that addresses the problems of reasonably savvy web users is likely to be contextually relevant to the concerns of visitors to TinyURL. Enough users click these ads to more than justify the startup cost and ongoing costs of maintaining the URL conversion service.
It's splitting hairs to try to decide whether sites that provide access to free downloadable software are providing a service or information. Whatever the case, a site that provides information, links, resources, and downloadable software covering a particular technology can draw a great deal of traffic.
For example, if you want to learn about RSS and Atom syndication softwaretools for reading and writing feedsand to download this software (and find easy one-stop links for the location of the download sites), a good site to visit is the RSS Compendium , http://allrss.com. Because of their usefulness, one-stop technology sites such as RSS Compendium (whether or not they provide access to downloads) can draw considerable traffic and content-based ad revenue.
If you are going to publish a site whose main draw is access to software, and then make money off the site with content advertising, it is worth bearing in mind that software that runs on the Web typically generates multiple page views for a single user running the software. (In other words, the user spends time on the web site.) This makes it better for the purpose of generating content revenue than a site that merely publishes information about software with download links.

With a download link, once the user downloads the software, there is probably going to be no more interest in the web content.

Funny Web Destinations

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Humor itself, as is well known, is in the eye of the beholder (and by itself as a category has infinite variety), but an example of a humorous site that is popular and makes money from contextual advertising is Googlefight , http://www.googlefight.com, a site that compares the Google rankings of two terms such as "God" and "Satan."
Humorous sites tend to have short half-lives. Like stars going nova, they can draw tons of traffic for a short while and then fade from view. For example, when Christo's Gates, an elaborate and well-publicized art installation, were up in Central Park, New York, a number of parody sitesCrackers Gates, Nicky's Gates, the Somerville Gatessprang up. These sites were quite popular for a week or two, but when the Christo art installation was taken down and the media publicity surrounding the installation faded, so did interest in the parody sites.
Today, everyone is bombarded with content in a variety of mediums. Things come and go quickly. For the most part, humor sites that are static , meaning that the content doesn't change, publish content that can be expected to fade from public interestwhich means that to make money from this content you must be prepared to strike while the iron is hot, because it will only be popular for a short while.

The reason that a site like Googlefight has some longevity, or legs, is that it draws upon a community effort to constantly update itself (with new examples of humorous juxtapositions). Community participation is a crucial element in many web content success storiesand has the virtue that you don't have to create the content yourself! See "Great Communities," later in this chapter, for more information.

Build It and They Will Come: Creating Popular Web Sites

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"Build it and they will come" is a wonderful line in the movies. Too bad it's usually not quite so easy in real life! True, good web content is occasionallynot alwaysdiscovered surprisingly quickly. More often, it requires a great deal of disciplined work to draw traffic to a web site, no matter how good the content of the site is.
And what is a good site and good web content, anyhow? "Good" does not mean a site with a halo! The way I use the word good in this chapter is probably circular: a site, and its content, are good if the site and its content draw traffic (or can draw traffic when suitably promoted).
If your site has a great deal of traffic, then the site's traffic is broad . Google itself is a prime example of a broad-traffic site: people use Google to search for myriad different things. But narrow, or focused , traffic can be more useful to advertisers than broad, unfocused traffic. For example, a site discussing complex ophthalmologic conditions might be very successful with targeted advertising even if it draws only a few hundred users a day. Google's traffic becomes more focused, and less broad, when a keyword search is initiated. And all the targeting in the world won't help unless you get some eyeballs.
To make money with your web site content it's a necessary (but not sufficient) condition that you have good contenteither broad or targeted at a specific niche. Content can mean information, but it also can mean other thingsfor example, software applications or jokes.
From a technical viewpoint, there are some issues about setting up a content web site so you can be flexible about the advertising you publish. Flexibility is good: to make money with advertising you need to do a great deal of tweaking. I'll explain how to set sites up so you can easily modify advertising as you go along without having to rewrite your entire site

A Final Tip: Googling Google

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If you find yourself staring at a Google feature you've never heard of before, or if you're wondering when Google introduced the calculator, or if you want to know about getting a job at the company, head to the bottom of the home page or any search results page and click About Google. The links there take you to all four corners of the Google universeif you can figure out where to look. For example: Is the calculator under Web Search Features or Services & Tools?
Half the time, it's easier to simply Google Google. There's a blank search box on almost every page within About Google, usually labeled "Search our site" or "Find on this site." When you run a search (like a google job) you get a regular page of Google results, complete with handy snippets. It's a terrific timesaverletting you learn within seconds that the place to send your résumé is www.google.com/jobs, for example. Too bad they don't make Google for your life.

Tip: Cheaters may never win, but cribbing with the Google Cheat Sheet (www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html) provides a quick hit of instant gratification when you can't remember a particular Google command. The Cheat Sheet keeps essential Google information stashed on one simple Web page, including a quick recap of common Google search operators, calculator functions, and the URLs for other Google services.

Nine Very Cool Google Tricks

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Google has a handful of tricks up its sleeve. Here are nine special and useful things you can do with Googleseveral of which even search hounds tend to overlook.
1.6.1. Definitions
When you can't remember what "sedulous" means, or you want to find out what a "wireless LAN" is, you don't have to bother opening the dictionary or calling your friendly neighborhood IT guy. Instead, Google can come to your rescue. Type define into the blank search box, followed by your term, like this:
define sedulous

and then press Enter to have Google include a definition at the top of your search results. (The definitions come from Web sites Google tracks.)
If you want a list of definitions and no other results, type in define followed by a colon and your terms, with no spaces on either side of the colon, like this:
define:wireless LAN

You can also get a list of definitions by typing your term into the Google Deskbar and pressing Ctrl+D (not available for the Mac). Alternatively, if you use Safari as your Web browser, you can type define: followed by your term in the Google search box (not available in Windows) to get the definitions for a word.
Google Definitions aren't just English-only, either. If you ask the site to define a multilingual word like "rouge," for example, and then click "all languages," you get definitions for what the word means in English, French, and Germanall on the same results page.

Tip: If Google doesn't come up with a definition that helps youor in rare cases, if it doesn't come up with one at alltry searching for your terms at www.OneLook.com, which aggregates definitions from nearly 1,000 dictionaries. That ought to do it.

1.6.2. Calculator
This trick is extra cool: You can use the blank Google search box as a calculator. Just enter an equation, like 2+2, and then press Enter to have Google tell you 2+2=4. For multiplication, use the asterisk (*), like this: 2*3. For division, use the slash (/), like this: 10/3. You can also use the search box to perform unit conversions, like this: 5 kilometers in miles or how many teaspoons in a cup? For a chart listing of units of measure Google can convert, check out Nancy Blachman's site, GoogleGuide, at www.googleguide.com/calculator.html.
The calculator works for simple equations and for some seriously complex operations, too, like logarithms and trigonometric functions. You can find a rundown of all its capabilities at www.google.com/help/calculator.html. And if you know what a physical constant isor the phrase "base of the natural system of logarithms" makes your heart pitter patter with joyGoogleGuide does a terrific job of steering you through these features.

Tip: For a great alternative interface to Google's calculator, check out Soople at http://soople.com/soople_intcalchome.php. it tells you all about it.

1.6.3. Phonebook
Google provides a phonebook service, letting you look up a phone number and address (with corresponding map) for business or residential listings. You can make it work in two ways: either as part of your regular search results (with a cute phone icon indicating that something is a phonebook listing), or as a separate set of listings. shows the difference.
Figure 1-17. Top: You get just one or two results when you know lots of details beforehandlike the full name of the person or business, and their state or Zip codeso you're likely to hit the right result.
Bottom: A full listing is the way to go when you have only a partial name and a state. (Either way, the listings are sometimes out of date, as shown at top.)
To have a single residential listing appear at the top of a regular results page, try typing any of the following into the Google search box:
First name (or first initial), last name, city (state is optional)
First name (or first initial), last name, state
First name (or first initial), last name, area code
First name (or first initial), last name, Zip code
Last name, city, state
Last name, Zip code
For a single business listing, typing in the company name along with city and state or Zip code ought to do the trick.

Tip: You can also type an area code and phone number business or residential to get the name and address associated with it in Google's phonebook. You don't need to include any punctuation.

To get a page of nothing but phonebook listings, type the word phonebook followed by a colon, then a space, and then the name and state you want to look up. (Weirdly, you can't capitalize phonebook.) The phonebook listings give you about 600 results, so if you're looking for a common name, add the city (if you know it) to narrow your search. Your query should look something like this:
phonebook: ansonia veterinary center NY

or:
phonebook: ansonia veterinary center new york NY

You can also narrow your search by telling Google whether you want to search for business listings or residential listings only. To limit your search to residential listings, type rphonebook before the name and state. For business listings, use bphonebook. (If you don't specify one or the other, and your results have both types, Google gives you five of each and lets you pick which you'd like the full set for.)

Note: Google has a parallel service, Google Local, that provides contact information for businesses anywhere in the U.S. Unlike the phonebook feature, which requires that you know a name, Google Local works more like a Yellow Pages, letting you search by business type (eyeglasses, or bagels, or dog walkers) in a specific Zip code or town. The results look similar to phonebook listings. (Sometimes, when you run a search even with a business name, you get results from Google Local, which has a compass logo rather than a phone icon.

The phonebook trick has a couple of quirks:
You can't use the minus sign to exclude terms. For example, if you want to find every New Yorker with the last name Doe except those with the first name John, you can't run the search rphonebook: doe -john new york NY.
You can't use OR to find listings in more than one state. For example, the query bphonebook: espn (NY OR NJ) gives you listings only in New Jersey, since Google reads the rightmost part of your query. On the other hand, you can use OR with the name of a person or business. So if you want to find an array of chain restaurants in the heart of Manhattan, try bphonebook: (espn OR hooters) new york NY.

Tip: If you want to remove your listing from Google's phonebook, head over to www.google.com/help/pbremoval.html, which provides a delisting form for residences and a snail-mail address to send delisting requests for businesses.

1.6.4. Street Maps
If you enter a U.S. street addressincluding city and state, or Zip codeGoogle usually tops your results with links to several maps.
1.6.5. Stock Quotes
If you enter a ticker symbol for a company or mutual fund listed on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, or the American Stock Exchange, Google begins your results with a link for that corporation or fund; when you click the link, Google takes you to a page with tabs of stock information from Yahoo Finance, Quicken, and other companies. You can enter one symbol, like this: msft (for Microsoft). Or several symbols, like this:
msft gm dis

If you don't know the ticker symbol for a company, try the full name. If Google recognizes it as a public company, it provides a link for stock quotes at the end of the result for that company.
Figure 1-18. Top: The stock-quote trick works for companies but not mutual funds.
Bottom: When searching for information about some public companies, your search results may come back with an up-to-date graphic of the firm's most recent stock performance.

Even when you're not specifically looking for the financial lowdown, stock quotes and charts may show up in your regular search results. Type in ebay, and you often get the stock's most recent daily performance results from NASDAQ, atop links to all other things eBay on your search results page.

Tip: Sometimes, adding the word company or corporation after the proper name in your query (like Microsoft Corporation) can prompt Google to recognize that you want stock info.

1.6.6. Patents, Tracking IDs, and Other Numeric Goodies
Hardly anyone knows this, but Google lets you search for numbers on the Web. And not just any numbers, but specific tracking IDs: U.S. patent numbers, FAA airplane registration numbers, FCC equipment ID tags, Universal Product Codes, maps by area code or Zip code, and vehicle identification numbers. When Google comes up with a match for your number, it shows you a special listing at the top of your results page.
Figure 1-19. Each type of result from a number search has a slightly different look, but they all appear at the top of a results page and include a link to the Web page with the info you're looking for.
Here's how to run the specific searches:
UPS, FedEx, and U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers. Looking up package tracking numbers and finding out whether your Lands' End long underwear is stuck in a warehouse in Kentucky has long been a major benefit of the Web. The process just got easier. Simply type your tracking number in a blank search box, and Google provides a link to a Web page with your item's transit history.
Patent numbers. If you look up patent numbers regularlyor everyou know the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office makes you jump through a lot of hoops to find a patent by number. Stave off a few gray hairs by using Google to look them up instead. Just preface the number with the word "patent," like this: patent 5123123.
Universal Product Codes (UPCs). For some basic information on consumer products, like their manufacturer, try looking up the UPC, like this: 036000250015 (no need to include UPC first). Most of the time, you can find UPCs under an item's barcode.
Federal Communications Commission equipment ID numbers. If you're an engineer at a wireless phone company, and you want inside info on a competitor's product, check out the FCC's database. To get there, type fcc into Google, followed by the ID number, like this: fcc G9H2-7930.
Flight numbers. Want to find out if your cousin's flight from Ottawa is on time? Check flight status by typing in the airline and flight number, like this: continental 501.
Federal Aviation Administration airplane registration numbers. If you're the head of a startup airline, and you're considering buying a used plane from one of the big industry players, this feature's for you! Just type in the registration number directly, like n233aa, and Google gives you a link to the FAA site with some details about the manufacturer and history of that plane.

Tip: You can typically find airplane registration numbers on the tail of a plane.

Vehicle identification numbers (VINs). If you're buying a used car, you can use the VIN to learn more about that individual auto's history (the VIN is usually on a small metal tag at the bottom edge of the windshield). Type in a number, like JH4NA1157MT001832, and Google provides a link to the Carfax info for that car.
Maps by area code or Zip code. Type in an area code, like 212, or a Zip code like 95472, and the top of your Google results includes a link for a MapQuest map of that region. The maps generally cover a larger area than the area code, but they can give you a sense of whether 609 is in New Jersey or Idaho.

Note: If you'd like Google to add another type of number to its search service, let them know: suggestions@google.com.

1.6.7. Weather
You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, thanks to Google's weather forecast feature. Just search for weather, followed by the name of the U.S. city you're meteorologically mulling, as in weather fargo. Google pops up current conditions and the four-day forecast for your specified burg. (The info comes courtesy of the Weather Underground site.)
Figure 1-20. Your four-day forecast is just a few keystrokes away in Google's search box; just type in weather, followed by the name of an American city. And if four days isn't far enough ahead for you, click the first link to jump to an even more foresightful forecast.
Most of the time, just a city name is enough information, but you can also add in the state and Zip code if you don't get the results you had in mind. (There are more than a few Portlands, after all.) And although you can easily get the weather for London (in Kentucky) and Paris (in Tennessee) if you include the state abbreviations, Google's weather feature usually refers you to CNN or BBC links for international weather.
1.6.8. Q&A
If you find yourself in need of fast facts, Google's Q&A feature may help fill the bill. The trick's to phrase your question as a fact.
If you want to know how many people live in South Korea or who the president of Mexico is these days, for example, just search for population of south korea or president of mexico. Google brings back the answer at the top of your results page.
1.6.9. Movies
Don't waste time rustling up a newspaper or waiting through Mr. Moviefone's yammering over the phone: You can find out what's playing down at the nearest multimegaplex by asking Google. If you live in Phoenix, just type movies phoenix or showtimes phoenix in the search box, and you'll get a list of films playing in theaters around Phoenix. If you click the film title you're considering, Google gives you a list of theaters and screening schedules.
You can search directly for a movie currently playing in your town, too. If you typed in star wars phoenix during the summer of 2005, you would've gotten a list of the theaters showing Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith around Arizona's capital.
If you've already told Google where you live using Google Local,you can leave off the city name and just type movies, showtimes, or star wars to get theaters, schedules, and showtimes (respectively) for your area.
Google's movie mania isn't limited to listing showtimes. If you remember vague details about a film but can't remember its title, try using the movie: operator in front of any factoids you remember, like directors, actors, or plot points in the production. The search movie: holy grail delivers a long list of films focusing on the Arthurian legend, including Excalibur, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and, of course, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. shows how obscure you can get.
Figure 1-21. The movie search operator does more than just round up theaters and showtimes for current flicks playing around town. Feed it a few facts from movies you can't fully remember, and Google brings back the title and other information like reviews and pop-culture cross-references. You can also use the movie: operator in front of actors' names to pull up a partial filmography of the stars' noted roles.

Two Important Google Quirks

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Much of the time, Google does what you expect. Quotes, "and" and "or," special symbolsthey're all familiar from other search features you've probably used. But Google has two quirks worth noting: weird wildcards and a ten-word query limit.
1.3.1. Wildcards
A lot of search engines let you use wildcards. Wildcards are special symbolsusually an asterisk (*) but sometimes a question mark (?)that you add to a word or phrase to indicate that you want the search to include variants of your query. The wildcard stands in for the possibilities. For example, it you're not sure whether the Culture Club singer was Boy George or Boy Gorge, you might search for Boy G* to see how other people have completed the word.
But Google doesn't let you include a wildcard as part of a word like that. Which, frankly, is a drag. (In programming circles, you may hear the partial-word wildcard referred to as stemming.)
Google does, however, offer full-word wildcards. While you can't insert an asterisk for part of a word, you can throw one into a phrase and have it substitute for a word. Thus, searching for "chicken with its * cut off" could find: "chicken with its head cut off," "chicken with its hair cut off," "chicken with its electricity cut off," and so on.

Tip: A single asterisk stands in for just one word. To set wildcards for more words, simply include more asterisks: "three * * mice" leads to "three blind fat mice," "three very tough mice," and so on.

The full-word wildcard isn't as useful as the partial-word wildcard. But it can come in handy for filling in the blanks and when your memory fails. For example, you've always wondered exactly what Debbie Harry was singing in the first line of "Heart of Glass." You think it might have been "Once I had a lung and it was a gas," but you're not sure. Maybe it was "Once I had a lunch and it was a gas." Type in "Once I had a * and it was a gas"; Google gives you 1,090 links suggesting the lyric is actually "Once I had a love…" In short, the asterisk combined with quote marks is good for finding quotations, song lyrics, poetry, and other phrases.
The full-word wildcard is also cool when you want the answer to a question. For example, if you're wondering how often Haley's comet appears, you can use the asterisk to stand in for your X factor by running this query:
Haley's comet appears every * years

If you type your query as a question ("How often does Haley's comet appear?"), then Google searches for instances of the question, which is a nice way to find other people with a thin knowledge of astronomy, but might not actually turn up the answer.

Tip: For a search engine that does allow partial-word wildcards, try Altavista (www.altavista.com).

1.3.2. The Ten-Word Limit
Quite possibly, you've been using Google since Bill Clinton was president and you've never noticed that the site has a strict limit of ten words per search. Indeed, for most people, this limitation isn't a problem. But if you're the type who likes to search for long phrases, it can be maddening.
For example, if you're looking for "There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold and she's buying a stairway to heaven," Google cuts you off after "gold." If that's a problem because, say, you want only instances of the whole sentence, or if you want to add additional query words (e.g. "live recording"), you can employ a couple of tricks to circumvent the limit.
1.3.2.1. Obscurity rules
You can get relevant results without wasting precious keywords by limiting your query to the more unusual keywords or phrase fragments you want to find. In this case, a query that included:
"glitters is gold" "buying a stairway"

would probably keep you on track while conserving eleven words. If that doesn't fly, try adding words in, one or two at a time ("buying a stairway to heaven" instead of "buying a stairway").
1.3.2.2. Playing the wildcard
Google doesn't count wildcards as part of your ten-word limit. So the full-word wildcard, described above, can really help you out here. Just toss in wildcards for common words, and you're in business. For example:
"* * lady * sure * * glitters * gold * she's buying * stairway * heaven"

looks strange if you're a person, but Google is a mess of computers, and it eats that query right up while saving you nine big keywords. This is a particularly good trick if you're looking for something with a lot of common words, like "year *, year *," or "easy *, easy *."

AdWords and Search Advertising Terms

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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.

SEO Terms

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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.

Ten Site Optimization Resources

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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.

Enhancing Your AdSense Revenue

2008-04-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

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.

Joining AdSense

2008-04-02T11:25:00.001-07:00

The first step in becoming an AdSense publisher is applying for and starting
an AdSense account. As with AdWords, opening the account doesn’t obligate
you in any way and doesn’t cost a dime. Nothing about AdSense ever costs
you anything.
The AdSense account never requires your credit card information but you
must at some point supply tax information so that Google can pay you. That
information consists essentially of your tax ID number or Social Security
number. (The latter is the appropriate identifier for sole proprietors and
small-business operators with no employees.) You use the W-9 form to
convey this information to Google. You may fill out and submit that form
online or mail a paper version of the form through an anachronistic institution
known as the “post office.”
AdSense offers three significant features:
Performance reports. Use your account to check the number of
AdSense ad displays at your pages, the number of clickthroughs, the
clickthrough rate (CTR), and your earnings. This information can be
delineated by date range.
Payment reports. Use this section to check your history of payments
received. Google pays monthly, whenever $100 or more is due.
HTML code for ad layouts. This section provides HTML code for all
available ad layouts and color palettes.
If Google doesn’t know you through the AdWords program, you must apply
for an AdSense account. The application process takes only a few minutes,
but the acceptance process and opening the account can take up to three
days. If you’re an AdWords advertiser and use the same password for the
AdWords and AdSense accounts, your AdSense account starts immediately.
To get going, follow these steps:
1. Go to the AdSense home page here:
www.google.com/adsense
2. Click the Click Here to Apply button.
3. Fill in the Email address and Password fields, and then click the
Continue button.
If you have an AdWords account, you may use its e-mail address and password
for your AdSense account. If you don’t have an AdWords account,
you must enter your e-mail address and create a password, though it can
be the same password you use for any other Google account, such as a
Google Answers account. For this series of steps, I assume that you don’t
have an AdWords account.
4. Fill in all the information required on this page and click the Submit
button.
Included here is an opt-out check box for periodic newsletters from
Google. Don’t worry about spam; Google is the least spammy company I
know. Frankly, I wish it would send more e-mail.
210 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
5. Open the e-mail verification from Google and click the supplied link.
This standard e-mail verification procedure lets Google know that you’re
for real.
6. Wait for Google’s acceptance e-mail.
After you receive that, you can log in to AdSense with the password you
chose in Step 3.
If you open your AdSense account as an AdWords user, with the same e-mail
and password combination, Google skips the formal application procedure
through e-mail just described. Instead, Google assumes you’re legit and takes
you directly to your new AdSense account. Along the way, Google lets you fill
out the necessary tax information. Starting your account this way, as an
AdWords user, gets you off to a quicker start. If you have an AdWords account,
I can think of no reason to open an AdSense account as a new user instead.
Even if you own more than one site, and intend to publish AdSense ads on all
your domains, open just one account. If you start a new account for each site,
and if Google connects the dots between them, your accounts might all be
closed. Some AdSense users do have multiple accounts that they procured by
writing Google for special permission. If you want to try acquiring your own
permission after opening one account, use the Contact Us link on your account
pages. The purpose of running multiple accounts is to separate the reporting of
different sites, because AdSense currently lumps everything into one set of
reports. The account doesn’t distinguish Web sites owned by the account
holder, even though the account holder is perfectly free to create and paste
AdSense code into any site he or she owns. Help is on the way. Google recognizes
the demand for site-specific accounting and is working to provide it.
Creating Your AdSense Code
AdSense is a simple, automated program. You need only place a snippet of
code into your page’s HTML, and then let the ads appear. When your page is
visited and loads into the visitor’s browser, the code reaches into Google and
pulls the appropriate ads onto your page. As with other ad servers, your
page content comes from two locations: The editorial content originates from
your server, and the ads come from Google’s server. This mechanism is invisible
to the visitor, and Google ads load extremely fast, thanks to the absence
of graphics.
After joining AdSense, Google provides you with a bit of HTML code. You
choose which pages you want ads to run on, and paste the code on those
pages. For this task you don’t need to know much about HTML, but it helps
to know a little more when you want to manually alter the code (in Googleapproved
ways).
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 211
As I walk you through the creation of AdSense code and describe how to
paste that code into your page, you might get the impression that you may
use only one code sample. Far from it! You may use variously altered versions
of the basic code throughout your site — a different layout and different
colors on each page, if you like.
Choosing an ad layout and color palette
You start creating your ads in the Settings portion of the AdSense account,
as shown in Figure 12-1. Two sections of the Settings tab help create ads that
conform to your site’s design scheme: the Ad Layout Code section and the
Ad Colors section. Actually, both sections deal with ad colors. The Ad Layout
Code section offers preset color palettes; the Ad Colors section lets you modify
those presets and save them. Here, I look at the Ad Layout Code section, but
you can head straight for the Ad Colors page if you want to play with more
advanced color controls.
To get to the Ad Layout Code page, simply log on to your AdSense account
and click the Settings tab. The screen shown in Figure 12-1 appears. Scroll
down to see the page’s interactive controls, shown in Figure 12-2.
Figure 12-1:
Select an
ad configuration
and
choose a
preset color
palette.
212 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Then follow these steps:
1. In the Select Palettes list, choose a color palette.
Use the scroll bar to see the full selection of palettes. Click once on a
selection to see an ad example on the right. Compare up to four palettes,
as shown in Figure 12-2, by making multiple selections. To make contiguous
selections, hold down the Shift key and click any two selections. To
make noncontiguous selections from the list, click while pressing the
Ctrl key.
2. Choose an ad layout by clicking a radio button next to a banner,
button, tower, or inline rectangle.
Click the View examples link to see what these ad layouts look like. (See
Figure 12-3.) Chapter 13 discusses style and effectiveness considerations
when choosing an ad layout.
3. Scroll down to the Copy-and-Paste box, and select the code.
With the mouse cursor inside the box, press Ctrl+A to select the entire
code snippet. It’s important to clip the whole thing; if you drag with the
mouse, you can accidentally leave out a top or bottom line.
4. Press Ctrl+C to copy the code.
5. Paste the code into your Web page document.
Figure 12-2:
The
interactive
color and
layout
controls.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 213
You may place the AdSense ad unit wherever you want on the page. Those
accustomed to working with raw HTML should have no problem positioning
the ad unit. Most WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page-building programs
recognize Google’s code as javascript. Therefore, these programs represent
the Google code on the graphical layout page like any other javascript
element, allowing you to move it around the page until it’s displayed correctly.
Depending on the program, you might need to upload the page and
view it in a browser to see how the ads appear in a live display. Some programs
make live calls to specified servers in their WYSIWYG display mode,
allowing you to display AdSense ads while rearranging their placement,
before uploading the page to the server.
When pasting code in my HTML documents, I find it useful to separate the
code, making future color alterations easier. (Chapter 13 discusses such onthe-
fly alterations.) Such a separation doesn’t affect the page’s performance.
Figure 12-4 shows a page’s source document with Google’s code set apart
from the surrounding code.
AdSense ad units are not HTML tables, though they resemble tables. But as
far as placement on the page is concerned, you can embed ad units into
HTML table cells as if they were child tables. Simply place the AdSense code
in the appropriate or tags. Figure 12-5 illustrates a site that plainly
embeds the ad unit in a table cell.
Figure 12-3:
Google
offers
examples of
all ad
layouts.
214 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Figure 12-5:
Embedding
an ad unit in
an HTML
table cell.
Figure 12-4:
Make your
AdSense
code easy
to locate by
separating it
from the
surrounding
code.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 215
Making a custom color palette
Google appreciates that the limited set of preset color palettes (described in
the preceding section) might not float your boat. Each ad unit consists of five
elements whose colors can be changed:
Border. The thin bar at the bottom of each ad, which continues around
the entire ad unit.
Background. The shaded area behind the ad’s text.
Title. The first line of text; the ad’s headline.
Text. The one or two lines of ad copy in the middle of each ad.
URL. The visible URL below the ad text, which might and might not be
the destination URL.
The Ad Colors page makes it easy to assign a distinct color value to each of
these five elements, thereby creating your own preset color palette. You can
name and save your custom palettes, after which they appear on both the Ad
Colors page (in a drop-down list of Custom and Built-in palettes) and the Ad
Layout Code page (in the scrolling list of palettes).
The interactive palette tool on the Ad Colors page doesn’t offer all possible
colors, by a long stretch. Specifically, the page provides 222 colors. See
Chapter 13 for ways to expand this palette.
For now, follow these steps to use Google’s colors in making custom palettes
for your ad units:
1. Go to the Ad Colors page of the Settings tab, shown in Figure 12-6.
2. Use the drop-down menu to select a starting color palette.
3. Click the radio button next to any of the five ad unit elements.
4. Click any color in the color chart.
Note that the example ad changes interactively.
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 for each ad unit element.
6. In the Palette name box, type a name for your new palette.
7. Click the Save button.
Your palette’s name appears in the Custom Palettes box and in the dropdown
list higher on the page. It appears also in the Select Palettes list on
the Ad Layout Code page.
216 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
To get rid of a saved custom palette, click the Delete button below the
Custom Palettes box. The deleted palette disappears from that box, from the
Choose a Palette drop-down menu higher on the page, and from the Select
Palettes list on the Ad Layout Code page.
Inserting your custom palettes into your AdSense code is simple. Here’s how:
1. After saving one or more custom palettes, go to the Ad Layout Code
page on the Settings tab.
2. In the Select Palettes box, choose one of your custom palettes.
3. Using a radio button, select an ad layout.
4. Scroll down to the Copy-and-Paste window, and select the entire code
sample.
5. Copy the code sample and paste it into your HTML page.
Note: The Alternate Ads box and the URL Filter page make their appearance
in Chapter 13. There, I explain how to (in the first case) substitute non-Google
ads for AdSense ads, and (in the second case) block certain AdWords ads
from appearing in your ad units.
Figure 12-6:
Use this
page to
create new
color
palettes for
your ad
units.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 217
Viewing AdSense Reports
The Reports tab of the AdSense account is where you track earnings and
related statistics. Google summarizes information daily but compiles it continuously
throughout the day. Statistics are reported quickly but not in real
time. As in AdWords, it can take a few hours for clickthroughs to appear in
your report.
The AdSense account provides two ways of viewing your clickthrough data:
Aggregate data. Clickthrough information is lumped together from all
your pages and sites and presented as an integrated set.
Channel data. Clickthrough information is separated by pages, sites,
and even specific ad units, as determined by you.
Before Google introduced AdSense channels in March, 2004, AdSense publishers
couldn’t see where their clickthroughs were coming from. If you were a
publisher operating two sites, both filled with ad units and making good revenue
overall, you wouldn’t know whether most clickthroughs came from one
site and the effort of putting AdSense code in the other site was largely wasted.
With channels, you can determine which sites, pages, types of ad unit, or specific
ad units are earning for you.
Viewing aggregate data
The AdSense account defaults to the aggregate view. Even if you leave the
account in channel view, it reverts to aggregate view when you next log in.
Figure 12-7 shows the report screen. Google’s terms of service for AdSense
prohibit disclosing report statistics, so Figure 12-7 extends down just to the
top of the reporting columns, and not to the numbers in those columns.
Google furnishes five columns of information:
Date. Reporting data is summarized daily.
Page impressions. The total number of times your ad units have been
displayed to visitors of your site. Each displayed ad unit on any page
counts as a single impression, so do not divide page impressions by the
number of ads in your ad units. (Trying to count impressions of individual
ads would not be feasible because you might be using multiple ad layouts,
each of which contains a different number of ads.) Google doesn’t
separate impressions by site, so the Page impressions column reports
total displays across all your sites and all their pages.
218 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Clicks. The daily number of clickthroughs across all your Web sites and
pages running AdSense ads.
Clickthrough rate. Calculated by dividing daily clicks by daily page
impressions.
Your earnings. A daily accounting of money credited to your account,
paid monthly when it totals more than $100.
The performance chart can give you some idea of the cost-per-click (CPC)
you’re earning from your ads. Divide the daily earnings summary by the
number of clicks to get an average CPC for that day.
Remember that you’re sharing revenue with Google, but the revenue split is
not disclosed by Google. I’ve never heard anyone complain about the phantom
split amount — which is to say, people grumble that the percentage is
undisclosed but seem satisfied with the amount of money coming in per
click. There can be wide disparity in what clicks are worth to you, especially
if you operate diverse sites or pages that pull diverse ads. For example, a
non-profit site keyed to developmental disabilities is likely to pull ads with
lower clickthrough value than a site about digital music.
Figure 12-7:
Five
information
columns
summarize
daily
impressions,
clicks, and
earnings.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 219
Totals for impressions, clicks, clickthrough rate (CTR), and earnings are tabulated
at the bottom of the performance chart. New accounts can extrapolate
annual earnings by counting the number of days summarized, dividing that
number into 365, and then multiplying the result by total earnings so far. Using
the date-constraining feature described next, you can also wait for a calendar
month to pass, and then multiply that month’s total earnings by 12. No matter
how you extrapolate, remember that CTR often goes down over time if your
ad placement is left unattended. Chapter 13 describes strategies for keeping
your ad performance fresh over many months of AdSense publishing.
Immediately above the performance table are a series of drop-down menus
that invite you to capture reported statistics by time period. The upper menu
contains six preset date constraints: today, yesterday, last 7 days, this month,
last month, and all time. The default setting, which appears every time you
log into the account, no matter which setting was selected when you logged
out, is “today.” Simply click any item in that menu, and then click the Display
Report button.
To fine-tune a date range, click the lower Date Range radio button and use its
set of drop-down menus to select a reporting period. Then click the Display
Report button. Here, too, Google forgets your setting when you log out. The
next time you view your account, the performance report displays statistics
for the current day.
Viewing channel data
The second way to view the clickthrough data in your AdSense account is as
channel data. AdSense channels are optional; I explain how to set them up in
the next section.
You view channel data on the same account screen as aggregate data, but not
at the same time. You need to make four clicks to switch from aggregate data
to channel data:
1. Click the Channel data radio button (see Figure 12-8).
2. In the list, select which channels to view.
To select multiple channels, hold the Ctrl key while clicking channels.
3. Click the Date, Channel, or Both radio button to select how the display
is sorted.
4. Click the Display Report button.
220 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
The statistical column headings are the same in channel view as in aggregate
view. The Show Data By group of radio buttons makes the following adjustments
to the data display:
If you select the Date radio button, Google aggregates the information
just as in the aggregate view, but only for the channels you selected in
Step 2.
The Channel radio button divides the data by channel and displays it
without a breakdown of individual days.
The Both radio button combines these two features, displaying data for
each channel and for every day of the time period you selected with the
Date Range menus.
Setting Up AdSense Channels
Using channels is a great way (well, the only way) to discover which portions
of your AdSense effort are making money. Before Google introduced channels,
AdSense publishers were collecting revenue with no idea of where,
Figure 12-8:
The
AdSense
performance
screen set
to display
channel
statistics.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 221
exactly, it came from. The pre-channel version of AdSense wasn’t a bad deal,
by any means, but there was a growing clamor for more precise reporting.
AdSense channels bring the program to an important level of maturity, and I
urge every publisher to use them.
Understanding channels
Google could have simply instituted per-domain reporting, which would have
helped publishers running AdSense on two or more sites. That would have
been an important improvement, but the channels system takes AdSense to
a higher level by being user-configurable. You decide how the channels are
assigned and how your AdSense data is broken down on the report page.
AdSense channels are groupings of pages, sites, or ad units. You may use up
to 20 channels at once, and you decide what goes into a channel.
Google assigns a number to each channel you create. A line of code containing
the channel number is inserted into your AdSense code (by Google or you)
and placed in your HTML (by you). That extra line of code tracks impressions,
clicks, and earnings for that ad unit, and compiles the information as belonging
to that channel. You might have many ad units or just one contributing
information to that channel. The ad units assigned to that channel might exist
on many sites or just one. The configuration of the channels is up to you.
Following are some common channel uses:
Per-site reporting. Assign every ad unit on each domain to a separate
channel.
Per-page reporting. If you display one ad unit per page, make each one
report to a different channel. If you run two or more ad units on a page,
make each page’s units report to the same channel. This strategy works
only if you operate 20 or fewer pages on your site. (Of course, if you
have more than 20 pages, you could select just 20 of them.)
Per-page-cluster reporting. Assign groups of pages to the same channel.
This tactic is useful when multiple pages perform the same function in
your site and are similarly trafficked.
Per-format reporting. If you use multiple AdSense formats and wonder
whether one style is more effective than another style, put all skyscrapers
in one channel and all horizontal units in another channel. This idea
works best when the varied formats are placed on pages that function
similarly in your site and are fairly equally trafficked.
Although you can’t receive reporting of more than 20 channels, you may
create more channels. You select which to activate and deactivate (I get to
this in just a bit). Deactivated channels continue to hold their accumulated
data; when you activate them, they pick up where they left off.
222 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
You can get around the limitation of only 20 active channels. To do so, create
additional channels and rotate their activation. This way, you can get fully
precise recording of your AdSense performance — just not all at once. Because
high-volume sites don’t require much time to accumulate meaningful data, a
week or so rotation through channel activation could provide a complete picture
of AdSense clickthroughs.
Creating channels
You create AdSense channels in a special section of the AdSense account.
Follow these steps:
1. Click the Settings tab.
2. Click the Channels link.
3. Click the Create new channel radio button, and type the name of your
channel.
See Figure 12-9. Name the channel descriptively, so you can recognize it
on the report page.
Figure 12-9:
Create as
many
channels as
you want.
Up to 20 can
be active at
any time.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 223
4. Click the Edit/Activate Channel button.
Your channel moves to the Active Channels list. Newly created channels
are active by default but can be immediately deactivated.
5. After creating as many channels as you want for now, click the
Continue to Ad Layout button.
You may return to this page at any time to create channels, deactivate
active channels, and activate inactive channels.
6. On the Ad Layout Code page, make the same format and color selections
you used when setting up your first version of AdSense code.
This can be tricky. In this step and the next, you’re modifying your previous
AdSense code by inserting a line that defines which channel the ad
unit belongs to. You don’t want to change anything else about the display
of your ad unit, so you must make the same selections now as you
did when first creating the code (see the “Creating Your AdSense Code”
section, earlier in this chapter). I describe another way of inserting the
channel information after these steps, and that method is easier for
anyone comfortable with manually changing simple code.
7. Pull down the Channel menu and select one of your channels.
See Figure 12-10. The AdSense code is instantly updated to include the
google_ad_channel line.
8. Copy the entire code snippet and paste it into the page(s) containing
the ad units that you want to be part of this channel.
If you run many ad units, I have a much easier way of altering your many
instances of AdSense code and inserting the channel information. In Figure
12-10, note the code snippet, which is the google_ad_channel line. The
number in that line is a unique identifier that associates the ad unit with a
channel in your account. That single line is the only modification necessary
to the AdSense code. Knowing that fact, it’s a simple matter to insert that
single line in the code of all ad units that you want to belong to that channel.
This is what I do:
1. Create your channels.
2. On the Ad Layout Code page, use the pull-down menu (shown in
Figure 12-10) to select the first channel in the list.
3. Highlight and copy (using Ctrl+C) the google_ad_channel line in the
AdSense code.
Copy only that single line.
224 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
4. Paste the line into a text file using WordPad, Notepad, or any text
processor.
Type the channel name above or below the line of code. You may jot
down the channel name and line of code on a piece of paper if you
prefer. You’re going to repeat this process with each of your channels, so
making a text file is probably the best way to establish this record.
5. Repeat Steps 3 and 4 for each of your channels.
You end up with a list of channel names and their lines of code.
6. Insert the appropriate line of code into each of your AdSense code
snippets.
Place the line in the same location that Google places it on the Ad
Layout Code page: between the google_ad_format line and the
google_ad_border line. That portion of the AdSense code should end
up looking something like this:
google_ad_format = “728x90_as”;
google_ad_channel =”4855956454”;
google_color_border = “B4D0DC”;
Figure 12-10:
When you
select a
channel on
the Ad
Layout Code
page, the
AdSense
code
instantly
updates.
Chapter 12: Starting an AdSense Account and Publishing Ads 225
Following this method saves you the trouble of remembering your AdSense
code values and replicating them on the Ad Layout Code page. Many publishers
run several formats and color schemes; recreating them all on the Ad
Layout Code page would be a nightmare. If you saved custom color palettes
on the Ad Layout Code page, you don’t have a problem, and you might prefer
clipping and pasting the entire snippet of AdSense code. But any publisher
who has created custom palettes by inserting hex color codes in the AdSense
snippet, as I describe in Chapter 13, will prefer the preceding method when
altering code for AdSense channels.
Activating a channel doesn’t flip a switch that affects your reports. You need
to insert the modified code in your AdSense pages. Activation and deactivation
affect which channels compile information and place it on the report
page. But you must complete the arduous chore of inserting the modified
code in all AdSense pages you want to group into channels before your activations
and deactivations have any meaning.
Adding New Pages and Sites
AdSense is limitlessly expandable because you can add AdSense to new pages
and sites anytime. Simply paste your preferred code into any new pages developed
for your site. If you use a consistent template across your site, simply
putting the AdSense code in the template assures that ads will appear on new
live pages. Leave the rest to Google — in time, according to your site’s crawl
schedule, relevant ads will appear on the new pages. If there’s a gap between
the time you launch a page and Google crawling it for content, the AdSense
program places public service ads on the page.
You may submit new pages to Google’s Web index if you like, though it’s probably
unnecessary (see Chapter 2). If your site is in the Web index, Google
usually finds new pages during its deep crawl, which occurs approximately
monthly. The best reason for not submitting new pages is that the AdSense
index is different from the Web index. In both cases, the best bet is to post
the page and wait.
Somewhat surprisingly, considering its stringent approval requirements,
Google allows AdSense publishers to paste code into entirely new sites
located at new domains. No application is necessary. After you’re in, you’re
in, and you have unlimited use of the AdSense code. Keep in mind, however,
that Google does send a human to every new site that makes a call for
AdSense ads to examine it for appropriateness. At that time, or very near that
time, Google crawls the new AdSense site for content.
226 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Removing Ads and Stopping
Your Ad Publishing
Just as adding new pages and sites is hassle-free, Google puts up no barriers
to exiting the AdSense program or reducing your involvement with it.
AdSense is entirely configurable on this point; you may publish ads on one
page of a large site, all pages, some pages, or across as many domains as you
deem productive.
Simply remove the AdSense code from any page you want to be ad-free.
Removing a page from the program doesn’t penalize other pages or change
the quality of ads delivered to your pages. To stop your involvement with
AdSense altogether, dump all the code. There’s no way to close your AdSense
account, nor is there any need to. It remains there, in case you decide to publish
ads again in the future.
When you remove AdSense code, remember to adjust your page code to fill
the hole you’ve just ripped in it. If you created a table cell to hold your ad
unit, for example, eliminate the cell or put something else in it.

Running AdSense on Existing

2008-04-02T11:23:00.002-07:00

Most AdSense publishers incorporate the program into existing Web sites to
generate extra revenue. As long as the site qualifies according to Google’s
standards of professionalism, implementing AdSense takes no more than a
few minutes.
204 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
AdSense is such a good deal that a question naturally arises: How about creating
sites specifically as additions to the AdSense network? In other words,
does Google allow Web pages that were created exclusively to display
AdSense ads? The answer is twofold:
Officially, no
Practically, yes
I’m not advising any attempts to fool Google. The best answer to this question
is complex. Google forbids pages whose only or main purpose is to display
AdSense ads. Those lame business attempts are cut out of the system
with alacrity. However, the motivation for creating a Web site isn’t really the
point. Google doesn’t interview Webmasters and doesn’t try to discern why
a page was created. Google cares about results, and the results it most cares
about are relevancy, user experience, and value for its advertisers. When
examining sites for eligibility in the AdSense program (and such examinations
are human processes, not automated ones), Google looks for solid content
enhanced by ads — not ads enhanced by scraps of content.
Whether you start a site with the intent of monetizing it with AdSense, or start
it with other business plans and incorporate AdSense as a supplement to your
main strategy, you should construct the resulting Web site according to the
same principles. Optimization, PageRank, relevancy, and usability are the
foundation stones of Google-related success no matter which part of Google
you angle into first. Build a site dedicated to AdSense revenue if you like, but
it won’t work to slap up a few bare-bones pages and throw AdSense ads onto
them. You’ll probably be kicked out, and even if you aren’t, you won’t make
any money. Build your content, build your PageRank, start drawing traffic, and
then start your AdSense account and you’ll be fine.
Show Me the Money
I vowed to never use a movie tagline as a section header. How depressing.
Okay, I’m over it.
When contemplating AdSense revenue, two questions naturally come to
mind:
How much can a Webmaster make?
What percentage of clickthrough revenue does Google pass on to
AdSense Webmasters?
Chapter 11: Introducing the Google AdSense Program 205
The answer to the first question is all over the map. Revenue levels depend
on site traffic, ad relevancy, clickthrough rates, and the value of the keywords
associated with the ads displayed on your site. Read the AdWords chapters
for a detailed tutorial — for now, just know that AdWords advertisers bid for
placement on Google pages by offering to pay certain maximum amounts on
each keyword they assign to their ads. Some keywords are far more valuable
than others.
Because AdSense buttons and banners (which I explain in Chapter 12) display
one, two, four, or five ads, whereas a Google page displays up to ten ads, you’re
hosting ads from the top bidders of the keywords associated with your site and
its ads. You’re sharing revenue from the biggest players and highest rollers.
Still, some ads yield spectacular clickthrough revenue (dollars per click) and
others yield miniscule clickthrough charges (pennies per click).
The second question is unknown. Google doesn’t publicize the revenue split.
Nobody outside the company knows what percentage of a clickthrough goes
to the AdSense Webmaster. Google operates what is probably the only affiliate
program in the industry that refuses to divulge the terms of payment. The
frequency is not a secret: Google pays monthly. But the split is shrouded in
mystery.
Don’t think there isn’t a great deal of grumbling throughout the AdSense community
about this peculiar state of affairs. A tribute to Google’s clout, the company’s
secrecy hasn’t stopped thousands of Webmasters from signing up. My
experience and the consensus of the community lead to the conclusion that
Google is sharing generously at this point. At any rate, right now AdSense provides
worthwhile money to well-trafficked and finely optimized sites.
Working Both Sides of the Fence:
AdSense and AdWords
Here’s another question that ambitious Webmasters and publishers are asking:
Can we run AdSense and AdWords accounts at the same time? Can we run an
AdWords ad to drive traffic to an AdSense site? Or, to phrase this in yet another
fashion, can an AdSense page be the landing page of an AdWords site?
No matter how the question is phrased, the answer is yes. Google allows you
to work AdWords and AdSense in sync. Whether such a tactic is advisable is
another question. On the surface, paying for clickthroughs (in AdWords) to
get clickthroughs (in AdSense) seems futile. But consider the following two
circumstances:
Pay less for your AdWords ads than you receive for AdSense clickthroughs.
Your AdSense ads represent the highest-bidding advertisers
for certain keywords because lower-bidding advertisers tend not to
206 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
appear on content sites. If you run AdWords ads for those same keywords,
and bid low for them using the Traffic Estimator in AdWords,
chances are good that your ad will be positioned lower on the page, and
run more cheaply, than others. This gambit requires some experimenting,
and the last thing you want is for your own AdWords ad to appear
on your site as an AdSense ad — leading dizzily right back to your site.
Bid on less valuable keywords leading to the same page. Suppose that
you’ve optimized your page for the keywords coins and coin trading. You
then build an AdWords campaign around more specific and less costly
keyword phrases, such as ancient roman coins. Your ads might not generate
overwhelming traffic, but the traffic won’t be expensive, either. With
your Web page optimally running AdSense ads keyed to more expensive
key concepts (coins and coin trading), your traffic could result in net gain.
In both these scenarios, remember that not every person who clicks through
your AdWords ad to your site will click your AdSense ads. Your AdSense
clickthrough rate might be less than 5 percent. So the differential between
what you’re paying for AdWords and what you’re receiving for AdSense must
be greater than 1-to-20. For example, if you pay only $0.05 per AdWords clickthrough,
you must average $1.00 per AdSense clickthrough to break even.
That’s a tough nut to crack.
Playing AdWords against AdSense is a risky strategy. Because the AdWords
program gives you the flexibility to try out strategies, you might want to
experiment with concurrent AdWords and AdSense usage. But generally, the
purpose of AdWords is to drive traffic that returns the investment in clearer
and more predictable ways. If you want to add AdSense to the revenue mix,
nothing is stopping you. Just remember that an AdSense click takes visitors
away from your site, a result that is at cross-purposes with most conversion
strategies. The best bet might be to place AdSense ads on your post-conversion
page, where you thank visitors for accepting a newsletter, buying a product,
or registering at the site — whatever the target conversion of your
AdWords campaign is.

Content-Sensitive Ads . . . or Not

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Success in the AdSense program depends on relevancy. That basic fact is true
for Webmasters of AdSense sites, for AdWords advertisers who allow their
ads to be distributed in the AdSense network, and for Google itself. Two factors
can inhibit the relevancy of ads on your site:
Chapter 11: Introducing the Google AdSense Program 203
Bringing a page up to spec for AdSense
The AdSense program can motivate you to make
a personal site more professional and to make a
bit of money from operating that site. Both design
and content considerations apply, as described
in Chapter 4. The key is to offer some kind of user
experience that isn’t just about you. Not that you
aren’t a fascinating person. But think about your
target audience. If your site is aimed at friends
and family, it’s probably inappropriate as an
AdSense host. Furthermore, if your audience is
very small and your traffic is low, the AdSense
program won’t make you much money anyway.
Broaden your audience and increase your traffic
by deepening your content and optimizing
your site. If you describe a hobby at your site,
add articles and links and optimize your tags.
Build your pages around keywords and aim for
a higher placement on Google’s search results
pages for those keywords. Building your site’s
PageRank leads to greater AdWords success.
Being accepted in the first place is mostly a
matter of the site’s attitude. Imagine a larger
audience seeking serious information, even
before you actually have that audience.
Google’s paramount interests are that users
have a good experience by seeing the most relevant
ads and that advertisers, in turn, get good
exposure to interested users.
Weblogs (blogs) may be considered for the
AdSense program, but they’re not guaranteed
entry simply because they’re content sites.
Developing a smart, interesting blog on a
focused topic (not just random personal observations)
can yield AdSense revenue. As with
other sites, Google will determine your blog’s
viability for the program.
If you’d like to be in the AdSense program but
are in doubt about whether your pages are eligible,
there’s one answer: Try.
Weak optimization
Quickly changing content
You have control over the first problem. Optimize your pages according to
the principles and techniques described in Chapter 4. Mainly, that means
constructing pages around core keywords, and embedding those words in
your text content, headers, and HTML tags in proper proportions.
The second problem arises on pages that change focus frequently. A topically
restless site normally implies poor optimization, but in many cases actually
reflects quick growth (new pages) or dynamic changes that are part of the
site’s purpose (such as a news site). Whatever the case might be, quick content
changes can leave your AdSense ads somewhat behind.
Google is aware of this situation and recrawls all participating AdSense sites
with some degree of frequency. “Some degree of frequency” . . . why am I so
vague? Because Google is a secretive company, and this issue is yet another
point at which Google shuts its trap. I have gone to the ropes with Google on
this point, and here is what I can tell you for certain:
The AdSense crawling schedule is automated.
The crawling schedule varies from site to site.
Participants in the premium AdSense program (see Chapter 15) are
crawled more frequently and reliably.
If your content shows a history of daily change, chances are good (but
not guaranteed) that your site will be crawled every day.
Remember that the AdSense index is distinct from Google’s main Web
index, and the crawl schedule of one index has nothing to do with the
other.
The upshot: If you change the focus of your content infrequently, Google
might take a while to catch up and deliver relevant ads again. If you regularly
change editorial focus, Google probably keeps up with your site pretty well,
serving ads nimbly.

Evaluating Your Site’s Eligibility

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The AdWords program is available to anyone willing to pay for qualified clickthroughs.
Google prevents the display of ads that are not sufficiently relevant
to gain a minimum clickthrough rate, sparing consumers irrelevancy on their
search results pages. Above all, Google protects the consumer search experience
on the Google site. Next on the food chain is the AdWords advertiser,
whom Google strives to protect from poor-quality exposure. For that reason,
Google limits AdSense host sites in certain ways.
To keep the value chain sparkling throughout the AdSense network, Google
establishes the following basic guidelines and terms-of-service rules:
Vanity sites aren’t allowed. This limitation is perhaps confusing because
some sites start out as personal expressions but add informational, editorial,
and service value over time. Google is the only arbiter of these situations.
A 15-year-old who puts up a Web page showing pictures of her
dog probably wouldn’t be allowed to run AdSense ads. An amateur historian
who describes Civil War reenactments and collects articles probably
would be allowed to run AdSense ads. AdSense sites don’t have to be
commercial, but they must contain content of some substance. Google
leans toward professional sites, whether they’re operated by individuals
or companies.
198 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
The optimization piece of the AdSense puzzle
Relevance is the name of the game at Google,
no matter how you approach it. On the front end,
searchers seek sites relevant to their keywords.
On the back end, advertisers seek relevant
matches between their ads and consumers
using the search engine. When it comes to
AdSense, relevance is likewise crucial to the
content publisher. The Webmaster needs ad
displays relevant to site content. If the ads are
irrelevant, visitors ignore them at best and are
annoyed with them at worst.
Google does its part by applying its relevancy
algorithm to the content site, deducing what it’s
about and serving up targeted ads. My experience
is that Google does a fine job . . . when the
site is well optimized. Here, I’m harking back to
Chapter 4, and pulling the Google business
process full circle. The major elements of building
your business with Google — optimizing
the site, building PageRank, advertising in
AdWords, and syndicating with AdSense — are
tied together by keywords. In this case, publishers
in the AdSense program get the relevancy
that they — or, more accurately, their
sites — deserve. Finely optimized pages, with
clear keyword associations built into their tags,
headers, and editorial content, get the most
finely relevant AdWords ads. Relevancy brings
higher clickthrough rates and more revenue.
Content sites are scrutinized for appropriateness. Like many terms-ofservice
rules applying to hosted content, Google’s guidelines prohibit
running AdSense ads on sites that promote illegal behavior, pornography,
or gambling. In a similar vein, excessive profanity can get an
AdSense site excluded from the program, as can content promoting hate
or violence. Copyright infringement of any sort (music, books, video) is
also out of the question.
The site must be functional. This is basic optimization. Make sure your
links work and that the site is available to visitors without undue delay
or difficulty. Remember, Google crawls the entire site and can easily discover
dysfunctional navigation.
You may not reference the displayed ads in your content. Just let the
ads appear. Don’t talk about them, and — most importantly — don’t
advise your visitors to click them. Don’t click the ads yourself. (See a special
warning about this point in the last paragraph in this section.) Don’t
offer incentives for clicking the ads or plead with visitors to support your
site by clicking any advertising on any page running AdSense ads. You
should probably avoid mentioning any of your advertising throughout
the site. Google is serious about protecting the clickthrough quality on
behalf of its advertisers. Clickthroughs are supposed to represent qualified
leads to the advertiser. If you dilute the quality of your site’s clickthroughs,
Google will cut you off like a stern bartender at closing time.
Use only supported languages. Google currently supports sites whose
main language is English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese,
Japanese, or Spanish. AdWords advertisers have access to greater language
support, including Danish, Finnish, and Chinese. But the issue is
not just displaying ads in the language of your site but also crawling and
identifying your site effectively.
Competing ads are not allowed. Before you advertising veterans get
alarmed, Google means “competing” in a strict sense. You can’t run other
ads derived from search engines, or text ads that look substantially similar
to AdWords ads. You’re certainly permitted to run banner ads (see
Figure 11-2) and, in most cases, simple sponsored links. Affiliate links are
definitely allowed.
To be accepted into the AdSense program, Google must check out your site’s
suitability. Interested parties simply apply online (a short contact form, which
includes your URL for their review). Once accepted, participating sites begin
by simply placing AdSense HTML code on their Web pages. (I describe this in
more detail in the Chapter 12.) AdSense ads start appearing almost immediately.
When that happens, Google is alerted to the presence of a new AdSense
site in the network and reviews the site for eligibility. Sites that fail to qualify
are discontinued soon after they begin hosting ads.
Chapter 11: Introducing the Google AdSense Program 199
The exact order of events is as follows:
1. Apply for and open an AdSense account.
As with other Google accounts, starting an account is free. The AdSense
program has no activation fee nor do you have to provide payment information.
However, you do need to provide a Social Security number or
tax ID number as well as an address so that Google can pay you. The
necessary tax-form submission is accomplished online — no need to
print and mail any forms.
2. Select an ad style for the AdWords ads that will appear on your pages.
Google provides interactive pages so that you can choose a display
configuration and the colors of the ad text and borders, as shown in
Figure 11-3.
3. Clip the code.
As you select display properties, Google creates HTML for pasting into
your page(s), as shown in Figure 11-4. The code uses javascript to call
the ads and pull them from Google to your site.
Figure 11-2:
This site is
running a
top-page
banner ad
and Google
AdWords
(through the
AdSense
program) in
the right
column.
200 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
Figure 11-4:
Google
provides
ready-made
HTML code
tailored to
your ad
style
choices.
Figure 11-3:
Select color
palettes and
ad layout
styles for
your
AdSense
pages.
Chapter 11: Introducing the Google AdSense Program 201
4. Incorporate the code.
Here, you put Google’s code into your page documents. You decide
which pages will run AdWords displays, and where on the page the ads
will appear. You need to have a working knowledge of HTML, or use a
page-building program that understands javascript and lets you drag it
around the page.
5. Upload your new pages and wait.
Your new pages, embedded with Google’s code addition, must be
uploaded to your server, of course. In most cases, Google ads start
appearing instantly when the pages are visited. If you visit your own site
immediately after uploading, you’ll probably see ads.
6. Google crawls your site.
Soon after your AdSense-enhanced site is first visited, Google crawls your
pages. Google is extremely responsive to new AdSense sites and performs
a relevancy crawl within minutes, in many cases. Whether or not your site
is in Google’s main Web index, it is still crawled for AdSense. In the (usually
brief) time between uploading your AdSense-enhanced pages and
Google’s AdSense crawl, the ads served to your site might not seem relevant.
Google fills the ad space with broadly targeted public service ads,
in most cases. Keep watching your pages — click your browser’s Reload
button or sequentially visit your pages. In most cases, within minutes you
see a change from broad, untargeted ads to highly relevant, sharply targeted
ads. The better your site is optimized, the more relevant its ads
will be.
Note: Chapter 12 probes the details of each of these steps. Google’s AdSense
pages also walk you through the steps in simple fashion. If you’re certain
your site is eligible, and you want to dive in without reading Chapter 12, feel
free. Experienced Webmasters can’t damage their sites with AdSense. You
can always bail out, temporarily or permanently, by simply removing the
AdSense code from one or more pages. (Each AdSense page operates independently.)
And you can always make changes when you want to alter the
display properties of the ads.
AdSense is not a path into Google’s main Web index. In reading this chapter
and in understanding that Google crawls every AdSense site, you might think
that clipping AdSense code and planting it on your pages is the quickest way
to get your site crawled. This tactic is neither a quick nor a slow way of getting
into the Web index and starting a PageRank. Google’s AdSense index is
separate from the Web index. Being in one does not put you in the other and
doesn’t hasten the other to crawl your site.

The AdSense Overview

2008-04-02T11:20:00.003-07:00

Google AdSense is an extension of Google AdWords. Specifically, the AdSense
program allows non-Google Web sites to display Google advertising (AdWords
ads), and then share the revenue Google charges advertisers when site visitors
click through the displayed ads. Clear as mud? Well, look at it this way:
Google ads appear not just on Google but on thousands of sites all over the
Web. These sites serve as syndicators of Google ads. (See Figure 11-1.)
196 Part III: Creating Site Revenue with AdSense
So, what does this seemingly slapdash distribution of Google ads do to the
vaunted relevancy of AdWords and search advertising? On Google, AdWords
ads are associated with keywords and are displayed when somebody searches
on those keywords. When the advertiser does a good job choosing keywords
related to the advertised site or product, relevancy is automatic and chances
are good that the ad is of interest to the Google user. What kind of relevancy
ensues when AdWords ads are displayed on a non-Google site — a site that is,
in most cases, not even a search engine?
Google builds relevancy between ads and their host sites by analyzing the
sites and determining keywords appropriate to them. This task might seem
presumptuous, but remember how much experience and success Google has
in crawling, absorbing, understanding, and indexing Web pages. After all,
Google is in the keyword-matching business and is arguably better at making
those matches than any other company in the world. So if you trust Google to
find Web pages matched to keywords, there’s no problem trusting Google to
display relevant ads on AdSense sites. It’s all about keywords.

The AdSense Overview

2008-04-02T11:20:00.002-07:00

Introducing the Google

2008-04-02T11:20:00.001-07:00

AdSense is Google’s “other half” of the advertising business. After
making search advertising famous with AdWords, by enabling anyone
to be a global online advertiser, Google introduced a program that enables
anyone to get into the other side of the advertising business by publishing
ads. I say “anyone” reservedly, because Google limits AdSense in certain
ways, whereas AdWords is open to anyone with five dollars and a landing
page. (See Chapter 6.)
This chapter surveys the AdSense program in an introductory fashion, from
the theory of ad syndication to the particular way Google lets Webmasters
publish ads. Chapters 12 and 13 provide more detailed tutorials in applying
for the program and publishing ads on your site. The glossary, at the end of
the book, includes every important AdSense term you need to know.

Optimizing a Site for Google

2008-04-02T11:18:00.000-07:00

A fully optimized site is not built from the outside in — in other words, as a
visitor conceives it. Instead, you build an optimized site from key concepts
and keywords, and its pages never stray from a tight connection to those
concepts and their related keywords. Furthermore, business-oriented Web
designers are always focused on their target audience — the people who
search for the key concepts and keywords embedded in the Web page. This
circular thinking — the relentless integration of design with result, of keyword
with content — distinguishes a finely optimized site.
In theory, you would construct a perfectly optimized site in roughly this
order:
1. Conceive the site.
Conception means determining the site’s purpose in specific terms. An
optimized site can have more than one purpose (information publishing
and Amazon affiliation, for example), but those purposes should be
tightly related. Conception means also identifying your target audience.
2. Identify keywords.
Boiling down the site’s mission to key concepts and keywords is essential.
Keywords can be single words or phrases, but keep phrases short for
now — three words at most. For example, using the fictional The Coin
Trader site (from Chapter 3), the keywords and phrases might be coins,
coin trader, coin trading, trading, collecting, coin collecting, and so on.
Eventually, you need keywords for every page of your site, and they
might differ from the core words used to distill the subject matter of
your entire site. During the entire keyword process, think about your
target audience — not only as a topical demographic, but as searchers
going into Google with certain keywords. When you identify keywords,
you identify your customers.
3. Register a domain.
Choose a domain name that incorporates core keywords.
4. Design the site.
Use spider-friendly principles explained in this chapter, Chapter 3, and
the final section of Chapter 2.
5. Write and acquire content.
Content development is an ongoing process that starts while you design
the site.
6. Optimize content by keyword.
Embedding keywords in your page’s text helps visitors and Google
understand the content quickly.
56 Part I: Meeting the Other Side of Google
7. Tag the site.
Tagging means embedding keywords into important HTML tags that
Google’s spider observes.
So much for theory, you’re probably thinking. Few Webmasters deal with
optimization issues from the very start. Most people optimize after the fact,
which is why SEO professionals stay in business: It’s harder to fix problems
than avoid them. But no matter how you approach it, improving your optimization
isn’t hard at all. And the knowledge it provides about sound page
design, content development, concise communication, and smart tagging
translates to invaluable online marketing technique.
The steps just provided merely sketch a process. The following sections get
down to the nuts and bolts.

Working the Link Exchanges

2008-04-02T11:17:00.000-07:00

Link exchange sites offer a formal method of exchanging links, with an emphasis
on raising Google PageRank. The best of these clearinghouses function
also as topical directories built by participating sites that submit their links

In a nutshell, link exchange sites work by supplying an outgoing link to your
site (an incoming link, or backlink, from your perspective) and asking for an
incoming link from you in return. There is sometimes no standard of acceptance,
application process, or human communication between you and the
link exchange. You simply type your site information into a form (see Figure
3-2), and within a short time the link to your site is created. You have an
informal obligation to return the favor at your site, which, when multiplied by
the many participants in the exchange, helps raise the PageRank of the link
exchange site. Most link exchanges operate free of charge to the participants.
40 Part I: Meeting the Other Side of Google
Although the preceding description covers many bases, the link exchange
field is complicated. Two major variations are prevalent:
Paid link building. Certain online marketing companies specialize in
building incoming link networks for their clients. Ideally, they approach
high-quality sites with strong relevance to the client site (in other words,
similar sites with high PageRank), and request placement of a link to the
client site. Content exchange is usually not involved. These services act
as agents on your behalf and work best when your site is good enough
to benefit other sites by linking to you.
Link farms. These exchanges build vast numbers of outgoing links with
indiscriminate disregard for topicality or any sort of editorial policy.
Only a fine line distinguishes legitimate link exchanges that accept site
information automatically and link farms. Google doesn’t like link farms.
Remember that Google’s spider has an inclusive robotic eye with great
peripheral vision. It sees the truth about link connections and their honesty.
Building your backlink network around link farms can do you little
good and might penalize your PageRank.
Figure 3-1:
A link
exchange
site that
offers a
real estate
directory.
Chapter 3: Building Your PageRank Through Networking 41
Google claims to distinguish link farms from meaningful link exchanges, and
generally discourages using any kind of link exchange site that contains no
content besides the links to build PageRank. Choose carefully. The more editorial
discretion exercised by the site, the more legitimate it probably is. Use
exchanges that maintain a tight topical focus in your field. A general rule is:
The more personal the link exchange, the more valuable the incoming link.
Link exchanges work on the principle that a rising tide lifts all boats. If the
exchange site benefits from a high PageRank (thanks to dozens of incoming
links from participating sites), its enhanced stature in Google bolsters the
PageRank of each participating site. The best and most honorable link
exchanges concentrate their networks in one certain field, in which case the
rising tide is lifting the boats of sites that naturally are in competition. The
mutual benefit is well and good, but the challenge remains to distinguish oneself
from the high-floating crowd and keep ascending on the search results
page. Site optimization techniques described in Chapter 4 can help with that.
When assessing link exchanges, select sites with a reasonably high PageRank —
say, 4 or higher. The higher PageRank benefits your own PageRank when Google
evaluates the backlink. A high PageRank also provides a kind of Google “stamp
of approval,” which might not be forthcoming at a less reputable link farm. (To
easily see a site’s PageRank, use the Google Toolbar. For example, in Figure 3-1,
the Google Toolbar lists a PageRank of 6.)

Google’s business isn’t just advertising

2008-04-02T11:13:00.000-07:00

In the beginning of this chapter, I emphasize
advertising as the revenue model that drives
Google’s growth as a business-services company.
My accent on advertising is not meant
to diminish Google’s great success in licensing
its basic search technology to Yahoo!, AOL,
Netscape, and many other high-profile Internet
portals. This licensing activity has generated
strong revenue flows for Google, matured the
company’s business standing, and extended its
brand to near-ubiquity. But most readers of this
book are interested less in licensing Google’s
search engine than in using AdWords and
AdSense as business tools.
It’s difficult to predict how far AdWords and
AdSense will take Google, and what their effect
on Internet culture will be. It’s not a stretch
to imagine that search advertising, using the
cost-per-click model that Google popularized,
could alter the Web landscape by reducing
advertisers’ reliance on flashing banners and
those heinous pop-ups.
Certainly, the business side of Google is revolutionizing
online marketing, changing it from an
art to a science, from guesswork to measurement,
from blind spending to targeted cost-perlead.