Google AdSense Tips (1-6)

Google AdSense Tips

Google just released a Newbie Central for their AdSense program, those ads webmasters can include on their site to earn money for every click on the ad from a visitor (if you're using the program, part of the advertiser budget will go to you, and the other part to Google). I wanted to add some tips from my own experience:

1) Remove the Adsense Border. By default, the Adsense units are surrounded by a border with a text box at the top that says "Ads by Gooooogle". You goal is to work the Adsense units into your content as seamlessly as possible, so get rid of the borders. Now, Google won't allow you to delete the borders, but they do allow you to control the colors of nearly every element of an Adsense unit. Simply make the border the same color as the background of your website. This goes for the background color of the Adsense unit as well, change it to match the background color of your webpage.

2) Use Rectangular Box Sizes for your Adsense Units. Like most people, when I first started with Adsense, I primarily used the horizontal skyscraper, you know, the one that looks like a banner. The problem is people have developed an advertising sensory overload, they don't even see banner ads anymore, they visually tune them out. You need to make your Adsense unit blend in with your content, so use rectangular boxes. I get the best response with the 336X280 box size. Most languages are read from left to right, so try to place your rectangular Adsense unit in a table aligned to the right of your text.

3) It's all about the colors. Google gives you an incredible amount of leeway with the colors you can select for your Adsense units. Use this to your favor, in addition to changing the border and background color, change the link and URL color as well. Most people are accustomed to clickable links being blue, so make sure your Adsense links are blue, with one exception: if you use a different link color on your site, change the Adsense links to match that color. At the bottom of each Adsense unit there is the URL for website paying for that ad. You want to draw attention away from the URL and towards the clickable link, change the color of the link to match the body color of the ad, generally black.

4) Don't put ads on empty pages. When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

5) Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

6) Avoid non-English characters on English pages. This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again. We appreciate your patience. Sincerely, The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Source: http://www.earn2online.com