What happens when your visitors can't find what they want on your website?
They might be bored, probably they're hungry for more or they might want
to refine their search. If you have a Google Search Box, you can now retain
these 'quitters' — and make money from ads they click from their search
results!
The Google Search Box isn't just an added convenience for your visitors — it
can actually make you money!
If your AdSense ads are being ignored, add a link at the bottom of the
AdSense ads, inviting visitors to try Google search. A simple note should do
the trick. Try something like: "Can't find what you're looking for? Try Google
Search!"
A Google Search box allows your visitors to specify their exact search terms,
thereby "pulling" more relevant ads to your page. Using the Search feature,
you can pull up on-demand AdSense ads at the top of the search results.
Putting a Google search box on your site brings advantages and
disadvantages. The big plus is that all the ads the user sees are going to be
relevant. The user chooses the keyword so the results are going to be right
in line with what the user wants.
On the other hand, that means you’ve got no control over the keywords they
choose so you can’t try to promote high-paying keywords. You have to take
what you’re given. You could have a high click-through rate but low revenues
(although there’s still no guarantee that the user will click on an ad rather
than an unpaid listing on the search results page.)
But your users will leave your site at some point anyway. Why shouldn’t you
try to make money when they do click away? Even if Search doesn’t bring
you huge amounts of money, you should still use it as an added revenue
source and to bring extra functionality to your users. I look at it this way. If
a visitor doesn’t find what they want on my site, I’d prefer that they leave
some change in the “tip jar” on the way out the door!
Submitting your site to all of the search engines from Google and Yahoo!
right down to the smallest ones, and optimizing each of your pages for high
ranking can be a drag. You also have to keep submitting the site on a regular
basis and constantly check your position if you want to keep it.
The search engines are always re-indexing and reorganizing. A site that can
be in the top spot one week can be a couple of pages over a week later.
(Good news if you’re low down, not so good if you’ve spent hours changing
your pages to climb the rankings.)
That’s why many webmasters simply outsource their SEO so that they can
concentrate on content.
There are lots of companies that do this. Search Engine Blaster for example,
lets you choose from over 600,000 engines but there are plenty of others.
Personally, I think that’s a bit of a waste of time. Only Google, Yahoo and
MSN are important, in that order.
Usually, your links will lead directly to your home page. That’s where you see
your site as starting and that’s where you want them to enter.
But if the content the user wants to see is on one of the internal pages,
there’s no reason for them to have to click around to find it. Fill that page
with keywords that relate to the content on that page and it will have its own
search engine ranking — and well-targeted ads.
So if you have a site about cats and one of your pages was about cat food, it
would make sense to put plenty of cat food keywords on the page. That
would get you cat food ads and a high ranking on search engines when
someone does a search for “cat food” rather than just people who wanted to
know about “cats.”
But those titles and URLs don’t just influence your ads; they also affect your
search engine rankings.
A page about toy cars called cars.html might have a low ranking when
someone looks for information about cars. Change the name to toy_cars.html
and you should get a much higher ranking when someone looks for “toy
cars”.
The more relevant your URL is and the easier it is to read, the better.
One of the first places you should look when you want to improve your
rankings then is your titles and URLs.
The first thing you need to know about indexing your site at search engines
is that you control which pages are indexed and which are excluded. You do
that with a file called robots.txt.
Robots.txt contains nothing more than a record of which robots should index
which pages.
Without going into too much detail, there are two conventions used in a
robots.txt file:
User-agent: [Defines which robots the site is addressing.]
Disallow: [Allows you to list the sites or robots you want to
exclude.]
In general, you’re probably going to use “User-agent: *” to make sure that
you’re addressing the robots of every search engine and you’ll probably want
include all of your pages (although you might want to exclude your
directories: “Disallow: /cgi-bin/”).
Robots.txt just allows you to control which robots index which pages. It’s
important to have in your directory but it won’t really increase your search
engine rankings.
Titles, URL’s and links are much more important.
I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know
from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good
blog but also because it’s still fairly new, so a lot of people aren’t making the
most of the blogs they have.
If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things
that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash.
The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping
rpc.pingomatic.com as soon you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free
all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search
engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools,
such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.
You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update.
Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also
keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest
posts).
Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each
page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how
many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries?
One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites
and higher search engine rankings.
You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that
write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way
to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult
to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it —
and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.
One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they build an Internet
business is to forget that there’s a world outside the Internet! Just because
you make money out of traffic doesn’t mean you have to source all of that
traffic online.
You should make sure that your URL is listed on all of your marketing
material: your business cards, Yellow Pages ads, flyers, envelopes, freebies
and just about anything else you can think of. You should certainly have your
site address in your email signatures.
There’s nothing like viral marketing to promote your site! It’s free, it comes
with trusted recommendations and it gives you great CTR.
Each of your content pages should have a link marked “Send a friend” which
opens a form so that the user can send your URL onwards. Until Google allow
ads in email, there’s little point in AdSense members sending actual content
but there’s no reason why you (or your users) can’t send links to pages with
ads.
Let’s start with the obvious: buying advertising. We’ve already talked about
AdWords/AdSense arbitrage but exactly the same principle applies to buying
your traffic from other sources too.
For example, the minimum price for advertising at Overture is ten cents per
click and you must spend at least $20 each month. If you can see that the
ads being served on your site are generating less than ten cents per click
then you’re never going to make a profit.
Exactly the same is true of any other pay-per-click advertising campaign.
One of the advantages of following your AdSense stats is that you can
estimate how much the clicks on your ads are worth. That can tell you how
much you can afford to pay for clicks from other sites when you buy
advertising.
It might well pay to advertise, but before you buy make sure it pays a profit.
Here is an extraordinarily easy and extremely successful idea. Use eBay to
get clicks and bring visitors to your merchant’s sites.
First, if you are not already doing so, start using eBay to buy and sell things.
The online auction site eBay.com is the 12th most visited site on the Internet,
with 41 million members and 1.5 Billion page views per month. You can
use that level of traffic to your advantage.
Once you have established an account with eBay and have bought and sold a
few items, add a few affiliate links in your description.
Ebay has a rule that prevents you from sending an eBay customer directly
from your auction listing to a separate website via a link, unless that website
has more info on the product you are selling.
In your auction description, provide a “For more information on this item
Click Here” link. Use an affiliate link that links to a product description
page.
Note:
eBay will not allow your link to direct the customer to a “Buy it Now”
page. Link only to a product description page.
I always have several Dell laptop auctions running. I place a link to Dell’s
page in my Auction Description. This Dell page has more information and
specs on the laptop and of course the link has my Dell Affiliate ID in it. If,
the customer buys anything from Dell while on their website, I will get a
commission.
I have several auctions that run on eBay continually. I even maintain
auctions on items I know will not sell quickly. I have auctions with a low
starting price and a high Reserve Price.
Note:
A reserve price is a tool eBay sellers can use to stimulate bidding on
their item while reserving the right not to sell below a price they have
in mind.
The end result is that I get a lot of exposure, and frequent commissions for a
small insertion fee of $3.30.
Some of my Dell Laptop Auctions receive thousands of page views and a
fraction of those follow my Dell Affiliate links and purchase from Dell.
This earns me a nice commission. For Example, I insert my auction for
$3.30, it has 3,000 page views over the 10 day period, 200 clicks on my dell
links and from those 2 purchases. All this for only $3.30.
Design your website to Highlight AdSense
Many websites have strong graphic elements that catch the eye —
usually at the expense of the AdSense units.
If you're using AdSense, be judicious in the selection of fonts, font size,
colors, images, tables and other visual aspects of your website.
Draw subtle attention to your AdSense units. Make them the stars of
your show!
------------------------------------------------Make the border go!
You can more than DOUBLE your click-through's with this one simple
tweak!
Even before the Internet, ads in newspapers and magazines were marked off
with a thick, heavy border. No wonder borders and boxes have come to
symbolize advertising messages.
Ads with prominent borders make your pages look cluttered. They distract
the eye from the ad text, while marking off the ad blocks from the rest of the
content.
Google provides an extensive color palette in your administrative area (seeWith just one simple click, you can match the color of your ad's border with
above). Use it to tweak the look of your ads to suit your web page.
the background color of your web page. When the border blends with the
background, it frees up loads of space. The page looks instantly neater and
the ads look more inviting.
Make sure you also pick a matching background color for the ad. The ad's
background must match the page background on which the ad will appear.
If the ad appears in a table, match the table background with the ad
background. The key is to blend the background and border color with the
page, so that the text looks like an integral part of your web content.
Don't forget to match the background color for your ad with the background
color of your web page.
After you are done choosing the right format and location for your AdSense ads, don’t sit back and wait for the money to roll in just yet. The next important step is to choose the right keywords for your web pages. These will influence both who visits your site, and how AdSense assigns ads to you.
The number one mistake most website publishers make is to constantly choose high-paying (i.e. expensive!) keywords assuming that it will yield them more income. While it is tempting to choose such keywords to get higher rankings on search engines, be prudent when it comes to selecting the right keywords that go with the AdSense ads that are to be displayed.
Remember the goal here is clicks, not SEO rankings. This is a case where you often do not get what you pay for.
Consider this scenario. Your webpage talks about wine tasting courses. You review search phrases and keywords with “wine” in it and you find “wine rack” is in the top three and available, so you buy it. The corresponding ads also focus on buying wine racks online, wine storage and building your own wine racks. After a week when you check on the statistics of your webpage and AdSense account, you see that you are losing visitors and your income is dipping! The keyword selection is faulty in this case even though it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Why? The visitors to your webpage were actually looking for wine racks and have landed on your webpage talking about wine tasting courses instead. The wine course types want to sign up for the courses, maybe buy a book on wine, or a wine of the month club. They don’t want to build a wine rack. Think strategically, not tactically.
Just because a keyword is high paying and is seemingly related, does not mean it is totally relevant and you need something relevant. Relevance is more important than value! In the above case, you could have – and should have – chosen wine tasting tour, wine tasting party, wine tasting event, wine tasting class, wine tasting school, course tasting wine and so on. You are interested in relevance more than popularity. Tasting is a match. Racks are not.
You may already be aware but just to be sure everyone is, forums and
community websites have notoriously horrible clickthrough rates. To
illustrate this point, I have a website which has about 500,000 to 1
million page views a day sometimes. That’s great right, right? Well, it’s
a forum based site and the clickthrough rate hovers around a dismal
0.3%! As good BlackHatters, it is imperative to understand what the
reasoning for that is and, once we get that, how to bring that number
up.
Now, to deduce what’s happening it doesn’t take a rocket scientist.
The main problem we’re being faced with is that the majority of our
traffic is coming from repeat visitors. They’ve been lurking around on
the site long enough to have become “ad-blinded” to it. So, what can
we do about that?
The logical solution: try using very strategic ad placement techniques
to improve the clickthrough rate. From experience, I can tell you that
the improvements can be nothing less than stunningly significant.
Blogs are similar to RSS feeds in concept except they usually have one author rather than an aggregate of sources of the material they contain. Blogs (short for Web logs) are simple webpages where you can write articles and other content on a variety of topics, and both the famous and the unknown use these online diaries to share their thoughts, post pictures, and so on. The public can view this content and even comment on it in most cases.
Due to the considerable amount – and unlimited range – of content on Blogs, it may make sense to place AdSense ads on them. In fact, it is much easier to generate revenue from Blogs as compared to other web pages, at least in theory.
- First, blogs are full of content, most of which is original most of the time. The content may not be “good” from a human reader perspective but it is usually “good” according to Google’s scans. Thus, getting approved by Google AdSense may be easier.
- The content presented on the blog, in many cases, is quite diverse which, unlike a website that needs to be “about something” can be excused by the “everything and nothing” nature of most blogs. Consequently, the possibility of Google finding targeted ads that are relevant may increase.
- Google AdSense works only with those websites that are already indexed by Google. Blogs get indexed far more easily than regular webpages. Some blogs get indexed in as few as two to three days of submission. Thus, the chances of getting approved by Google AdSense increases
- Blogs can be created at practically no cost – much cheaper than commercial websites.
Adding Google Ads to your RSS feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has gained huge popularity on the Internet. RSS is an XML document format that organizes and stores news-like content from various sources into one source. Think of it like a newswire service, the kind of stuff that scrolls along the bottom of cable channels. A large percentage of the “news” items you find on any website that is not a major news portal got there through an RSS feed.
Google has introduced a specific program known as AdSense for RSS. Although, it is under beta testing currently (mid 2005), you can join this program now and start making money with it. RSS offers a variety of interesting content options that most websites themselves can’t match.
Google AdSense for feeds has its own set of policies. These can be accessed at:
http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=20134 Like the AdSense program, you must follow all guidelines in order to be accepted for the AdSense for feeds program.
“Location, location, location.” It is true in real estate and true in advertising, including web advertising. Since the “location” of the user is your site already, the “location” of the ad in this context means on which pages, where on the pages, and so on. As noted, the less an ad looks like an ad, the more effective it is likely to be.
Then there are general design and usability factors to consider.
If your webpage is cluttered and you can’t dispense with any content, you may want to break it down further into sections or more pages to provide easier reading. This also gives you the potential benefit of placing additional ads.
As noted, we generally recommend text-based ads. However, text-dense sites may actually do better with image ads. If your site has very few graphics, you may want to balance it out by putting image-based ads. In the monotony of a lot of dense written information, image-based ads and graphics provide what’s called visual relief. This can also prompt clicks.
Where should you put the ads? The chances of your ad getting noticed by the visitors to your site increases greatly if you place ads as close to the top of your webpage as possible.
If you choose to place so-called ‘skyscraper’ ads – in magazines these would be called columns – on the sidebars of your webpage, it would be wise to place them on the right side of your principal content areas. The reason for this is the visitor to your page (in most languages) will read from left to right, he or she will chance upon the ad ultimately, if not consciously then at least out of habit. Their eyes will go there. From the left, they can visually “skip” the ad when they start reading next to it.
Obviously if you have a “most popular” area on your website, such as a page that is updated daily with some kind of material that people bookmark to revisit often, place your ad(s) there instead of somewhere else that may get less traffic. For many websites the home page is not actually the most accessed area. If you don’t know what the traffic pattern is on your sites, it’s easy to find out – ask your hosting provider about usage logs.
One more thing: While some affiliate marketing programs encourage host sites to encourage clicks directly, it is not appropriate to expressly ask your readers to click on the ads served by the Google programs. Not only is it unprofessional and arguably unethical, it also annoys people and moreover Google AdSense actually prohibits any such activity. You can neither directly solicit clicks nor can you do anything considered deceptive to encourage clicks.
In conclusion, the emphasis is always on quality of content on your web pages.
Good and interesting content makes your site better, more acceptable to Google, more likely to win with AdSense, and therefore more profitable for you!
You can let Google decide for you the type of ads that will be displayed on your webpage, but as the website publisher, you may be in a better position to decide what ads suit the content of your website and how you would like them displayed. To the extent possible, whether chosen by Google or you, make the ads seem like part of the site itself.
Most internet marketing experts believe that the ads on your website have a high probability of getting clicked if they blend in with the rest of the content of your web page. Factors such as color scheme, font size and type, and the appearance of your ad should match your web page. Borders are optional and we think often you should opt out – why put a box around the ad that says “Hi! I’m an ad!”?
Also, regardless of other design choices, text links should be blue. Why are text links blue? For the same reason Henry Ford said of the Model-T “They can have any color they want so long as it’s black.” They just are.
Though we think text ads are generally better than graphic ads, also known as image ads, Google does offer them with the program.
Actually, you don’t need to struggle much with whether graphic ads or text will be better on your pages, as Google’s technology will suggest whether an image ad or a text ad will be more suitable and which will earn you maximum revenues (since you earn part of they earn, they have motives to get this mix right).
However, it remains totally up to you whether you wish to run image ads or text-based ads. You can select only image ads, or text ads or a combination of both these formats on your entire AdSense account or on one page at a time based on your discretion.