But easy does not always mean simple.

Google makes it easy to sign up, generate an ad and put it on your site, however, it’s not always so simple designing your site for interest, finding high paying keywords and placing your ads so that they attract maximum clicks.

Here are a few surefire tips that will help draw interest to your site and your ads while helping you get the clicks that will make you money.

1. Build content rich sites

Content rich sites do several things for you. They keepviewers on your site because you are providing information of interest. It’s also important to keep the information refreshed periodically with up-to-date and current content. This is not only useful for your viewers, the search engines like it as well.

Sites containing useful content will also help establish you as an expert in your field allowing viewers to respect your opinions and suggestions. But most importantly, good content will keep your viewers coming back to your site. They will bookmark your site more often and notify their friends a lot more.

2. Research and use higher paying keywords.

Develop site pages using topics that contain high paying keywords while keeping the keywords relevant to your topic.

The Overture website has a free ‘keywords bid tool’ that is excellent for showing you what advertisers are paying for keywords.

For example, using this tool I can see that the keyword ‘pet medication’ has a maximum bid of $1.51 while the keyword ‘pet name’ has a maximum bid of $.11. If I were looking for informational pages to add to my pet site, the clear choice here would be to develop a page about pet medications and optimize that page for the keyword ‘pet medication’.

3. Place your ads in the upper left hand quarter of your website.

Studies show that people almost always scan your site from the top left working down. Placing a vertical skyscraper ad in that section can help increase your click through rate from 2% to as much as 30% or higher.

4. Don’t use horizontal banners or ads.

Google recommends that you use vertical as opposed to horizontal ads. Web surfers see lots of horizontal banners and ads and they almost instantaneously avoid them.

According to Google, wider ad formats such as the large rectangle and inline rectangle also tend to perform quite well. This is probably due to the fact that they are more reader friendly allowing you to read more text at a glance without having to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words.

My experience is that positioning these ads just before or just after your main content can increase your clickthrough rate substantially.

5. Avoid the Dead Zones

Google research has shown that there are zones within your site that won’t generate clicks. These areas are the top right of your site, the bottom right-hand corner and the very bottom. Ads in these areas are often ignored. Keep your ads to the upper left and center or just above or below your primary content.

6. Coordinate the ad colors to match your site colors.

Google adsense offers an array of colors that you can use to display your ads. Choose the two main colors of your site and use those colors for your ad. Keep the URL link of the ad in blue since this is the link color that most viewers are used to. The idea is to blend your ads with your site content so as to invite more clicks.

7. Follow the adsense program policies to the letter.

Google keeps a close eye on how their ads are displayed and they will cancel you immediately if you break the rules. Google adsense is an excellent way to bring in some extra revenue so don’t risk losing a good thing.

What do we want linking to do for us and what can linking actually do for us? Well we want it to get us traffic. Most of us think it can get us traffic two ways. One way we hope to get traffic is by making the search engines think we are good because of all the links to us. We are hoping that will rank us higher in those search engines.

All the SEO companies want to help us be on the FIRST PAGE of Google. Well with the billions of websites now and all the keywords maxed out – can we all be on the first or second page? Of course not! So, how much does it really matter where you rank in Google?

Let me give you an example provided by David Notestine from Zeus link management programming. He will provide server logs to back up stats that show:

• they get 6000000 hits per month for Zeus
• about 20 of those hits are from search engines
• about 3 percent result from paid adwords (not profitable he says)
• the remainder are from hits from links on other websites

What should we really expect from our linking strategy. Let’s get hits from links on other sites. Forget that other stuff about pleasing the Google Gods!

So why don’t we all help each other with good linking practices? If you are going to link to me so that others can find my site, why in the hell don’t you make it easy for those visitors to go from your home page to your link index? WHERE IS THE DAMN text to click on for links? If I can’t find it to verify my link, then I know damn well that your site visitors won’t find it or even look for it if it’s that hard to find. As you can see, this really irks me.

Secondly, for your link site to be useful to me, visitors need to find me or my product in that huge directory that we all are trying to develop. The best way to make it easy for searchers to find a link to a website or product is with a “search utility” installed and kept current on the page of that big link directory. Visitors can then search for a product, name or contact and get easy and immediate results.

Oh yes- one late addition here and get one more pet peeve off my chest. Don’t email me requesting a reciprocal link and then tell me to do the work at both sites by adding your link to my directory and add my link to your directory. This really gets my goat!

I hope you can see that a few little things like this will make linking work the way it should for ALL of us and not for just ten or twenty websites! It really can be a simple thing to make linking work for you!

Tom Henricks
Amateur webmaster for my little shopping website

http://www.tomsvirtualmall.com

Source: http://www.365articles.com

Relevance to a search:

• The frequency of the search word on a web page is an indicator of its relevance. If a web page contains the word ten times on the page, it is ten times more relevant than a page which contains the word only once.
• The position of the search word:
  • In the title tag.
    In the HTML coding, the title tag is <title>(Your title words…) </title> This appears in your browser at the very top of the screen, above File, Edit, View… This tag is important to search engines as it is visible to the visitor, and ostensibly sums up the purpose for the page. Other meta tags are largely ignored by search engines.
  • In a heading.
    In the HTML coding, the heading tag is <h1> (Your heading…) </h1> This tag is very important to search engines as it is visible to the visitor, and ostensibly sums up the purpose for the page. The size of the heading does not matter. Take care not to have more that one such heading on the home page. (Don’t confuse the search engine).
  • In a link to another page.
    In the HTML coding, such a link could be <a xhref=”whodickies.htm” mce_href=”whodickies.htm”>Whodickies</a>. If “Whodickies” are important enough to have a link to them, they are very relevant to a visitor’s search for whodickies.
  • In the body text.
    Key words near the top and the bottom of the text are important. Certainly many search results show the beginning and end of pages.
• Proportion of the search words on the page.
  The intensity of key words in relation to the total words in a page tells a search engine if there is spamming. Experience has shown that if the key words in a search make up more than 10% of the total web page the page is marked down. Some experts say 5%.
• Number of inside pages linking back to that web page.
  The more inside pages linking back to the home page the more relevant the home page appears to the search engine. A website with 30 pages must seem to have more information than one with 3 pages.
• Number of other websites linking to that web page.
  A website with links from 20 other websites seems more popular than one with links from only 2 other websites. The quality of such links has a bearing. e.g. Links from other websites which display your key words are better that links from websites without those words.
• Number of articles published linking to that web page.
  Many websites publish articles on many subjects. Check the formats acceptable. Compose your article, then submit it.

Why do different search engines give different rankings to the same website? Each search engine may give a different weight to each of the factors above. Why would a website lose or gain ranking position, without any change? Search engines change their secret algorithms (formula of factor weighting) from time to time. Other websites may enter the lists, change, or leave the lists. Remember that the main reason for putting up a website it to be found by search engines, so do all you can to be friendly to them. More information on search engine optimization of websites can be found at platypus websites – www.platywebs.com.au

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However, this understanding is rarely transferred when a business decides to ‘go online’. Perhaps the initial setup is so daunting that little thought is spared for anything beyond the layout and content of a website. The internet, however is still a marketplace, and one that is growing exponentially. Those same business skills need to be put to use here too.

If you want to learn from the success of your competitors you first need to think like a search engine. By mimicking popular keywords and phrases you can benefit from traffic that would otherwise be directed to your competitors sites.

Keywords are contained in what are called ‘Meta Tags’. These are tags that are found in the source code at the top of a webpage and include descriptions, titles and key words. Search engines use this information (in addition to content) to rank your page for different search strings. You can access this information by viewing the source of any website, just simply select ‘View’, and ‘Source’ from the toolbar.

If after looking at this code you fear it resembles some alien language, do not despair! There are many programs available that will search competitors’ sites for this information and provide a full report: in plain English. Just look for anything about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), it is one of the new hot topics; and you will be swamped with products.

The danger is to believe too much of the hype, don’t pay for promises; search engines are not as easily tricked as we are!Another key ingredient is links. Your page will be ranked favourably if it is viewed by the search engines as being an authority on a given subject. Links work a bit like votes, if someone links to your site they are effectively ‘casting a vote’ of approval. However the weight of this vote is affected by how many other sites they link to, so beware of ‘link farms’ (pages contained entirely of links) because they will not help improve your site’s positioning. The easiest way to obtain links is through online directories – although people may not visit your site directly through these links, it will help with overall search engine positioning.

Returning to the competition; you can discover who is linking to other sites by using an online link popularity checker. This way you can try and get these sites to link to you also. Remember, directed traffic is the best, so aim for links from sites which contain similar content to yours. If you are a business selling stamps, your best links would be from stamp appreciation pages – obvious really. The internet has been established for a while now. It is no longer an unknown jungle. As a new business entering this arena you can learn from other people’s successes as well as their mistakes!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Say there are a lot of competing web pages mentioning your product – how should a search engine put these pages in order of relevance to a search? Say some pages contained the word once, and some contained the word ten times, and some contained the word between two and nine times. If all other factors (e.g. number of links from other web pages) were equal, search engines would list those pages containing the word ten times first, followed by those with the word nine times, then eight times, etc., and then those pages containing the word only once listed last.

Let’s build up a list of search words for one product. Take tents for an example.
What words describe it?
Here are four words – tent, marquee, marquise, bivouac.
What are its uses?
Camping equipment, holidays, vacations, parties, functions, weddings.
What material is it made from?
Canvas, etc.
What is your brand name?
People may have heard of your brand and may look for it by name. Let’s say it’s brand name is “Dingo.”
Where is it available?
Some products you may sell worldwide, but possible delivery costs could be limiting. People may search for the product in their own area first. In that case your state, your nearest city, and your suburb are required key words. Say your area is Penrith. Your customers may search for Penrith, Sydney, NSW or Australia, particularly if they live outside the city or suburb.
Key Words so far are 24:
Tent, tents, marquee, marquees, marquise, bivouac, camping equipment, holiday, holidays, vacation, vacations, party, parties, function, functions, wedding, weddings, canvas, Dingo, Penrith, Sydney, NSW, Australia. (Include singular and plural, where possible.)
Where should these appear on your web page?
Title tag
This is the most important tag which displays at the very top of your browser. Use every key word here. But words here need to be seen also on the web page.
Keywords tag
This is now largely ignored by search engines.
Description tag
Same as above.
Heading tags
Instead of “Welcome to Dingo Inc.” say “Dingo Tents and Marquees”
Links to inside pages
Instead of “Products” say “Tents” and “Marquees”
Instead of “About Us” say “About Dingo Tents”
Body text
This is where you can be creative. Mix the key words into phrases and sentences. See how many ways there are to describe the products, their use, and where they are.

Examples of Keywords embedded in text:
Pole tents, frame tents, canvas tents, vinyl tents, play tents, event tents, party tents, wedding tents, camping tents, stall tents, large tents, small tents, tent accessories are all at Dingo Tents. Holiday under canvas with a Dingo tent or marquee. Dingo has camping equipment for your next vacation. Dingo tents and marquees are in all sizes. See inside for tent sizes. A large Dingo marquee ensures nothing will dampen your wedding, party, or outside function. Dingo tents and marquees are near you if you live in Penrith or Sydney, NSW Australia. Dingo tents can be delivered anywhere in NSW, Australia.
See how in just the hundred words above it’s possible to mention tent(s) twenty times. Provided the key words are embedded in a lot of text, and not repetitive, like “tents, tents, tents,” they will count for you. When the text of the whole page with contact details, etc., is considered the proportion of key words to total words will be lower and acceptable. The font can be small but is not allowed to be invisible. Search engines have formulas for discerning where text is the same color as its background.
Search for competing websites and see how many key words they have fitted into their home page. Then try for more key words on your page.
Do all this before you start your own website.
We are often asked to redesign someone else’s website, after they realize their work of art is not appreciated by search engines. Start out to be friendly to search engines.

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