Adsense
Once you have built your website you need to learn how to make money from it and one way is by displaying advertisements that are relevant to your content and visitors interests. Google offers a program called Adsense that is very simple to use and can be very profitable for your website while also providing your traffic additional links to investigate. Adsense is a pay per click or pay per impression program that serves text, images, videos, and rich media ads so that you can be sure to have the best advertisements displayed at all times. One great perk of using Adsense is that Google is both reputable and has one of the best targetting systems online to determine the best ads to display on your website at any given time, eliminating the need for you to spend time and resources searching for advertisers and determining what ads have the highest click through ratio on your website, Adsense handles all of that work for you!
Because Google Adsense is so popular and powerful you do have to read and follow their rules and terms but in reality they set those rules to provide the best relationship between the advertisers and your website so it is a good thing. For instance they only allow a certain number of ads to be displayed on each page, this prevents designers from just building a page full of ads that do not provide any real value to the surfers or the advertisers. They also have rules about what type of content can be displayed with the ads, this protects the advertisers and lets you know what type of material you should be focusing on when you build your websites.
Setting up Google Adsense is as simple as you will find, once you signup with Google and fill out the forms you get the chance to setup different Adsense accounts for your various websites and pages. This includes determining what type of advertising you want to show and the layout/colors of the ads. Then Google provides a simple javascript code that you place in the coding of your website where you want to show the ads. Adsense does the rest crawling your website and determing the best possible ads to display then continually tweaks and tests to ensure that you are displaying the highest paying ads with the best chances of being clicks or in other words the highest CTR with the highest PPC!
While the automation of Adsense does a great job of determing the best ads to display it is up to you to determine the best locations for the ads on your webpages. Depending on the type and size of ads you ask Google to show you might consider placing large graphic ads at the top, bottom, and sides of your websites pages while targetted contextual ads might be better to place inside your articles and at the end of your main body of content to provide your traffic with a place to contine to investigate more of the type of content you have just presented to them.
Search Engine Optimization
The Basics of SEO (search engine optimization):
SEO is a much debated concept concerning how best to optimize your website to get listed in search engines. Of course getting listed in search engines is one of if not THE most important traffic source for most sites to being SEO is important.
To optimize your site for search engines you need to learn how search engines work and what criteria they use to rank their listings. Google is the biggest search engine so it is important to try to build your site to rank well with them. However Google also tweaks its rankings regularly and nobody knows exactly what formula is used to rank the listings so beware of any SEO expert that says they can guarantee a listing because the rankings change constantly their technique might work for a few months and then end up getting you banned.
The best and easiest SEO tool is to simply build a quality website that surfers will want to visit filled with useful and relevant information. If your site is useful and interesting most likely the search engines will reward your efforts. It also helps to make sure your html code is ‘clean’ and easy to crawl by the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization – Terms & Definitions:
SEO – Abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization which is the theory that you can optimize a website for better rankings in the search engines.
Ä Rankings – Where your site is ranked in the search engine results (ie. in the top 10 is best).
Black/Gray/White Hat – These are terms to describe whether the techniques used to get higher rankings in search engines are looked at as ‘cheating’ by the search engines or simply quality improvements. (black is bad, white is good and Grey is in between). It is my opinion that it might not hurt to learn all types of techniques but realize that in the end it is best not to actually use the ‘cheating’ technique because eventually you will be caught and your site will suffer.
Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Tags: marketing, search engine optimization, seo, traffic, visitors