AdSense to generate a decent income, but only if you have the
content that draws visitors to your site in the first place.
Your site visitors care about content
You probably already have a Web site to which you want to add AdSense
and that’s a good move. Honestly, any site that’s well designed can probably
benefit from AdSense tips. If you’re just building your site for the first time, you
can do a number of things to optimize your site so that you get the most from
your AdSense investment.
Ease of advertising sales:You could find out which advertisers are
putting their ads on your site and go straight to them to cut a deal for
advertising that would cut Google right out of the picture. But would you
know who to contact? And would you know how to go about convincing
the advertiser to put his ads on your site.
You created your account, waited, and were approved. Now AdSense is
active. Now you can fill that blank space on your Web site with money-
generating ads. But first you have to set up your ads.
Log in to your new AdSense account by using the username and password
that you set up during the registration process. The page that appears at
login is the Reports tab AdSense always opens to this, which features
a quick overview of your earnings and the reports that are available for
AdSense. Because you don’t have any data to be reported.
First and foremost, keep in mind that the layout of your site will dramatically
affect how your AdSense ads perform.
Smart site design
After you come up with a name for your site and figure out where it’ll be
hosted, it’s time to begin actually designing your Web site. You can deploy a
few strategies that will make it easier to optimize your Web site for AdSense purposes.
Make your site easy to navigate by creating a consistent navigation
structure across your site and by making that navigational structure
obvious to visitors.Nothing’s worse than getting stuck on a Web page
without a link to the home page or another way off the page without
using your back button or closing your browser completely.
Include relevant links to other Web sites.
Use a site map-a text document that links to every page on the site
and submit it to Google.To submit your site map, you have to be a
member of Google’s Webmaster Central, but signing up for that is as
easy as signing up for any other Google account. After you sign up,
submit your site map by using the form. (You can find links to the forms
as well as other pertinent info at www.google.com/webmasters/
start.
Include clear, relevant content.
Make sure the HTML that makes up your site is written correctly.
Repair broken links as soon as they’re noticed.
Allow crawlers access to your Web site by including a robots.txt file in
the design of your site.The robots.txtfile has two lines:
User agent: *
Disallow: /
Create the file with a text editor, such as Notepad, save it using robots.
txt, and then when you upload your Web site to a server, be sure to
also upload this file.The file tells Web site crawlers that they’re
welcome to look at all the pages on your Web site.
Design your pages for users, not for search engines.Users come to your
site because they need something. Design your site so that the visitors
you’re targeting get exactly what they need — information and products
that they’re searching for. By designing your site with your visitors in
mind, you’ll automatically hit most of the requirements that search engines
have for ranking you in search results. A good rule of thumb is the more
useful your site is to real people, the better crawlers will rank the site.
Avoid any kind of underhanded Web site design, such as using hidden
pages or hidden text that’s only meant to be seen by Web crawlers.
Believe it or not, crawlers recognize this kind of sneaky design, and
you’ll be penalized in search rankings for it.
1. If you haven’t already done so, log in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the AdSense Setup tab, immediately to the right of the
Reports tab.
3.On this page, select the type of ad block you want to set up.
For this example, go ahead and select AdSense for Content.
The page that appears is the first step in the Ad Wizard, which walks
you through setting up your ad.
If you prefer a single-page form instead of using the wizard, click
the wizard’s Single Page link. The information you’re asked to enter is the
same, but on the single-page form, you just scroll down the page instead
of clicking a Continue button.
With the ad placement basics out of the way, it’s time to figure out how to
convince the good folks at Google AdSense to place ads on your Web site
that have meaning to your site visitors. Your ultimate goal by implementing
AdSense is to entice visitors to click or view the ads that appear on your
page. That only happens, though, if the ads are appealing to visitors. Having
the right content is the key to having the right ads.
4.Choose your ad type and click Continue.
Your choices here are
• Ad Units: A graphical text box inside of which linked ads are displayed.
• Link Units:A set of linked keywords that
lead to advertisers’ pages.
Just to keep it simple for now, select Ad Unit.
5.In the new page that appears, choose the size of ad you want to have
appear on your Web site.
Google offers a variety of different shapes, sizes, and types of ad formats.
The format that works best for you depends on the space you
have available, the content of your Web site, and the design of the page
on which the ad appears. For now, select 234 x 60 Half Banner from the
Format drop-down menu.
6.On the same page, choose a color scheme for your ad.
Google has several pre-made color schemes available in the drop-down
list to the right, or you have the option to specify border, title, background,
text, and URL colors by hexadecimal number.
This is useful if you know the exact hexadecimal numbers of your
Web page design and want to match them.
For your purposes, select Seaside from the drop-down list.
7.Still on the same page, choose Slightly Rounded Corners from the
Corner Styles drop-down list.
The other options available here are Squared Corners or Very Rounded
Corners. Visually, each has a different appeal to people in different situations
and on different Web sites.
8.For the last option on the page, choose Show Public Service Ads from
the drop-down list and click Continue.
What’s this about public service ads? Well, Google shows public service
ads when your site is so new that it can’t be properly populated with
paid ads and when your site content doesn’t match ad content. You can
choose to have these ads displayed, to have ads from another service
displayed, or to have a solid color displayed as a placeholder if either of
these situations applies.
9.In the new page that appears, click Continue.
This page of the wizard gives you the option to assign the ad to a channel,
but you have not yet set up channels.channels aren’t an aspect of AdSense
that you need to worry about. They’re for tracking your ads, but before
you can track them you need to know how to create them and get the
highest percentage of clicks possible.
10.In the new and final page that appears, enter a name for your ad unit
in the appropriate field and then click the Save and Get Code button.
When the page appears, a default name is already filled into the Name
text box.
11.Copy the code provided by AdSense and paste it into the HTML code
of your Web site.
How you access your HTML code depends on how you got your code in
the first place. If you’re using an HTML Editor/Web Page Creation program
to design your Web site, you may need to dig around the menus to find out
how to get the raw HTML code on-screen. If you’re writing your code from
scratch, though, all you need to do is pull up the Web site code and paste
the ad code into the spot on which you want AdSense ads to appear.