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I know it exists somewhere. That small, yet butterfly effect straw, placed on the unsuspecting camel’s back inviting closer scrutiny, congressional hearings, government intervention or a huge class action into the affairs of the mothership Google, is out there. All the little flags keep popping up, one more business ruined, many more cases of click fraud, one more tweak in the algorithm that damages commerce, one last utter absurdity that drives someone important to the brink of insanity.

Or maybe it will be the one hack or mistake that releases too much personal data or one sensitive government database indexed and opened to the public in an attempt to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” and the tool we use every day to find information in this vast library known as the internet will get the colonoscopy they deserve.

If I weren’t so anti-government, and the US government weren’t so inept at what they do, I’d be championing the cause. Why? Because Google is an unyielding monolith that exists only to organize that which has already been created and is working as diligently as possible to mold the world’s information and our access to it as they see fit.

If you think the notion of a Supreme Star Chamber of 9 black robed men and women deciding law for an entire nation seems absurd, what must you think of a single company that controls nearly 50% of what the entire world searches for online and the order in which they are able to find it? And what must you think of that same company who takes in 25% of all advertising revenue spent online, yet doesn’t have to clearly define what they actually expect of their advertisers? What must your average legislation writing bureaucrat think of it?

If you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m on a rant. Another run in with the absurdity that is Google Adwords is the cause. I often wonder why I continue to even try to to business with a lifeless algorithm and equally lifeless canned responses to email inquiries once I actually make contact with a real human. Oh, that’s right, I do business with them because they’re virtually the only business in town.

The latest judgment by the almighty algorithm came as I was attempting to set up a PPC campaign in two different Ad Groups, bidding on nearly identical keywords, sending traffic to the exact same landing page in both Ad Groups. Not similar pages, the same page, with the same url. The only difference was the tracking sub-id so I can tell which keyword is converting. Both groups ran for 5 minutes and I get an email alert from Adwords telling me my landing page url is wrong in the second Ad Group. No, it’s not wrong, how could it be, it’s the same url? Please, I’m losing my mind, can I get a human being to look at this.

So in an attempt to humor the lifeless entity disapproving of my advertising, I switched the .us ending of the url to a .com and get another 5 minutes to run my ads until they’re again switched off for the same reason. I then switch back the url to the correct .us suffix thinking that maybe a human will take a look at it this time and only end up getting another 5 minutes of ad time before the email once again lets me know of the supposed url error. At this point I’m livid enough to start swearing, drinking and writing bad checks and have to walk away from my desk before I end up on YouTube in the next computer and office destroying video frenzy.

I find it beyond amazing that it takes only 10 minutes to disapprove my ads twice with the effect of shutting down half of my advertising, but it takes 3 days to answer an email inquiring into what is an obvious error. Of course there will be no easy resolution as the first email I see hopefully from Adwords tomorrow will be the usual nonsense response that won’t even deal with the issue and instead will be a rehash of some policy found buried deep in the bowels of Google’s Adwords help files.

After 3 or 4 emails traded between myself and the helpmeister from somewhere near the molten core of our planet I’ll probably just decide that’s it’s better to do my own landing page and be done with the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just spend my money at Yahoo instead.

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In yesterday’s post about how to make money with Adsense I covered how to find the right niche that’s going to pay you on a consistent, long term basis. Today I’m going to cover how to place ads on your site to generate the most revenue and how to SEO your site so you will get the most relevant ads. The more relevant the ads, the more people will click on them and of course, the more you will earn.

All this comes with a warning though. You do want to maximize your earnings and generate the most revenue you can with Adsense, but you never want to trick people into clicking on ads or ever encourage people to click on your ads. If you try and fool Google, you will be caught and your account will be banned. Please read the terms of service for Adsense and follow them, because your revenue depends on it.

You certainly have to follow Google’s terms of service for Adsense, but there are lots of things you can to do place ads prominently so people will see them and have the best chance to find something that interests them. And that’s the mindset you need to develop when using Adsense to generate income. You want your advertising to be interesting, relevant to your visitors and in a place where they don’t have to look for it. If you just go plastering Adsense blocks top-dead-center on your site, you may generate some revenue, but not as much as you could be generating. Think of serving your visitors, not just seeing how much you can earn from them clicking on ads.

Google Adsense Secret #1

The best place to put your Adsense units to generate the most interest in the ads displayed is right within the content of your site so your text actually has to wrap around the ads. If there is any secret to Adsense, this is certainly the biggest one. If your visitors have to read around the outside of your Adsense block, they may have your ads in their sight for 15 to 30 seconds depending on how much text you have and how fast they read. That’s an eternity on the net and gives a huge advantage to ads that are placed outside of the content of your site. Other placements of Adsense will never generate the revenue this kind of placement will.

In general I have not had good luck with right sidebar type placements of Adsense because they are the opposite of what you are trying to do with in content placements. Visitors have to be looking around your page to click on ads in the right sidebar and they generally have a very low click through rate.

Google Adsense Secret #2 

To make your ads placed in the content of your site get an even better chance of being clicked on, you will want to make the background and the border color of your Adsense unit the same color as the page background they wil be sitting on. This has the effect of removing the borders so it looks like you just have a few text ads floating in the middle of your page content. The border acts as a separation of your ad from the content wrapping around it, so get rid of it and let your ads blend in with your text.

The screenshot below shows the Adsense layout on my best earning site so you can see exactly how I have things set up. This is a tried and true set up that has been working for me for about 4 years and it places the ads right in front of the visitor for the maximum amount of time.

This is another mindset change you have to get used to in order to maximize earnings with Adsense. The more you make your ads stand out by creating wild color schemes, off color links (I never use anything other than standard link blue) and ads that say click me, click me, the less those ads will be clicked. When you make your ads less noticeable and seem like they were meant to be there, the more they will get clicked.  I regularly get a 15 to 17% CTR on the site pictured above with this layout.

The last thing I want to cover in this post is SEO for Adsense. This isn’t SEO for your site, it’s SEO for Adsense and what you can do to get Google to serve you the most relevant ads possible. John Pratt sort of stole my thunder with his comment yesterday on how to set up your title, description and keywords, but I’ll expand on what he mentioned a little.

What you want to include besides great content on your specific pages are a keyword rich title, a keyword rich meta description, meta keywords relevant to your content (I still use meta keywords, but only include 4 or 5 phrases at the most) and a keyword rich H1 title at the top of the page above your content. This all helps Google read your page and serve you ads that fit your content and many believe your page title is probably the most important tag, so make sure to include relevant keyword phrases in it. Putting your keywords as close to the beginning of your page title as possible will also help.

Sometimes though, no matter what you do, Google doesn’t seem to be able to read your content correctly and they serve you completely irrelevant ads (This sometimes happens even on well established pages). You also at times may write about something that’s not that relevant to your site or you may mention something, such as your competitors, that you certainly don’t want ads appearing for. There is something you can do to force Google to read only certain sections of your page if they don’t seem to be able to serve relevant ads.

You can target certain sections of your content in effect telling Google only to read specific portions of your page. By using these tags at the beginning and end of text you think is most relevant to your page, Google will serve ads based on what you have between the first and second tag.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can even use this on multiple sections of your page, skipping areas you don’t want affecting the kinds of ads that show up. It is best to use as large an area of content as possible so Google has a lot of keywords to determine relevancy.

I’m thinking this could have been a 3 part series on Adsense rather than 2 parts, so I hope you haven’t had too much to read in this post.

Try experimenting with the techniques mentioned above and in part one of the Adsense series and see if you don’t have a nice improvement in your earnings. Of course I can’t guarantee you anything will happen because there are so many factors that go into doing well with Adsense, but these principles have helped me generate a fairly steady Adsense income for several years.

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