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
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.

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Optimizing a Site for Google

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.

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