How to Controll Your Ads Controlling Your Ads
1. Attracting Relevant Ads
Getting the color and placement right will help improve your click-through rate. But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves. In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash. The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money. The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page. Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.
2 Keep The Title, Directory And Headlines Relevant
How exactly the crawlers read pages is a secret guarded about as closely as Coca Cola’s special syrup formula. One thing that does seem to have an effect though is the title of your URLs and files. When you create your pages and view them on your computer before uploading them to the server, you should find that AdSense serves up ads related to the name of the directory that holds the page. That gives a pretty big clue as to at least one of the things that Google is looking at: the name of the directory. Actually, it’s not just the name of the directory that’s important. The name of the file plays a big part too. If you have a website about wedding trains and the title of one of your pages is trains.php for example, there’s a good chance that you’ll get ads about Amtrak and Caltrain. That wouldn’t give you many clicks. Change the name of the file to weddingtrains.php and there’s a much better chance that you’ll see ads related to weddings. If you find that the ads that are appearing on your site have nothing to do with your content, the first places to look are your directory and your title. Make them more relevant to your content and you should find that you get better ads. Another place to look is your headlines. Instead of using a <font> tag for your heading, try using the <h1> tag with headings that contain your keywords. That should help them to stand out to the crawlers. And if you don’t have any headlines at all, try adding some.
3 Finding Keywords
We know that Google’s crawlers search websites for keywords, then reports back and tells the company what kind of ads to send to the site. If your site is about pension plans for example, then your keywords would be things like “retirement”, “401k” and “pension”. Getting the right keywords on your site won’t just make your ads relevant; it will also help you to make sure that the ads you get are the ones that pay the most.
There are all sorts of tools available on the Web that tell you how much people are prepared to pay for keywords. www.overture.com and
www.googlest.comlet you see how much people are prepared to pay, and keywords.clickhereforit.com also has a list of keywords with their prices.
On the more professional side, WordTracker provides a wealth of keyword research tools that unearth pure gold. You can check it out at www.WordTracker.com. Again, you don’t want to build a site just to cash in on a high paying keyword but if you know that “401k” pays more than “retirement” for example, then it makes sense to use the higher paying keywords more than the lower paying ones. See Chapter 17 for more on finding the most up-to-date high paying keywords.
4 Keyword Density
You’ll need the right keywords to get the right ads. But you’ll also need the right amount of keywords. There’s no golden rule for putting the right number of keywords on a page to get the ads you want. You’ll just have to experiment. It also seems to be the case that keyword density is counted across pages, especially for high-paying keywords. If you have a site that's generally about cars and you write a page for car rental, a higher-paying keyword, you might find that you need to produce several pages about car rental before you get the ads.
In general though, if you find that your ads are missing the point of your page and that your titles are all correct, then the next step would be to try mentioning your keywords more often and make sure that they’re all finely focused. For example, talking about “fire extinguishers” is likely to get you better results than talking generally about “safety equipment.”
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