In a previous article, I talked about the importance of tweaking your Google Adsense adverts, specifically issues of size and placement. If you haven’t read that yet, I suggest that you start by reading Improving Your Adsense Click-Thru before you proceed with this, the second part of the topic.
You’re back now? Great. Let’s keep talking about this interesting topic.
The leader in the pay per click (or PPC) market is Google, with its Adsense program, but if you’re already an Adsense subscriber, with adverts on your own pages, you might not realize the importance of the design of your advert and the placement of the advert on the page.
A devoted reader wrote to me, asking:
“I have just picked up your new book Creating Cool Web Sites, and it’s great stuff. I specifically read the chapter on how to increase your findability and am still wondering if there are even more tips and tricks about how to get good search engine ranking?”
A letter came in this morning:
Help! I read about some sort of major security hole where people can exploit the Safari help system and drop junk onto my computer? What’s that all about? How can I avoid it being a danger on my computer?
Here’s a search engine optimization concept that most people don’t think about: make sure you have keywords and key phrases in your TITLE tag. You know what the TITLE tag is, it’s the tag that gives you the name of the page on the Window frame in your browser, and it’s remarkable how few sites pay any attention to what’s in that critical search engine optimization (SEO) field.
Search engine optimization, or “SEO” in the biz, isn’t only for people trying to turn their Web site into a revenue machine, to make money online, but can really be useful for everyone building Web sites. There are lots of different facets to writing, designing and adjusting your Web pages to maximize the chance of them being a top result for search terms, but one of the best – and easiest – is to work with keyword density.
Imagine you were a really big company and walked into the offices at Google, saying “I’ll offer you a deal: I’ll add your advertisements to my Web Pages, you sell the ad space, and we’ll split the revenue.” Sound too good to be true?
It’s not. It’s Google’s Adsense Program and it’s the basis of thousands of different sites currently earning money each time someone clicks on an ad. Some of these sites earn just a dollar or two each week, but others are earning over $500 each day. Without doing anything special, without managing ad inventory, and without worrying about collecting payment from advertisers.
A reader of Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther writes in to ask for an explanation of the regular expression shown in this command:
du -s * .[^.]*
