It used to be the case that search engines would figure out what sites to display for a given search based on keywords from each site compared to the words in the search. But then Google came on the scene. Google indexes your entire site, not just the keywords. That’s why content is so important, you could stuff a thousand keywords onto your site but if you don’t have the content to back them up Google doesn’t care. So are keywords still that important to use?

Google may look at them to try to figure out what category your site will go into for some regular expression matching based on a users search, but it probably won’t matter unless you have a high pagerank with a ton of backlinks.

Having said all that I wouldn’t just abandon keywords on your page. No one knows how the algorithms work for search engines so it’s better to be safe than sorry. Keep using them, but focus on content and linking.

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In the early days of Adsense/Adwords some webmasters figured out that you could buy cheap Adwords to drive traffic to your site so that the traffic would click on their expensive adwords.  This practice is commonly called arbitrage.  The word fits, arbitrage means to take advantage of the difference in price on nearly identical items in different markets.  The markets are adsense/adwords, the items here are the adwords that are bought and sold.

To do this you would have to research high paying keywords (finance, medical) and create a site that has *some* useful information about that.  The idea being that you want those to be the ads that appear on your site while providing useless information to the user creating a desire in the user to click your ads.  Then comes the harder part, you would need to setup your adwords campaign.

For this you need to find keywords that are similar to the ones you are targeting with your adsense site, but are much cheaper.  It has to be similar because your target audience needs to be already interested in what the ads on your site will display.  They need to be cheaper because you will only earn a fraction of the money that is paid for the clicks on your site (while you pay for the entire click on the adword you buy) and you need to make a profit.

There are many stories of people on the web spending thousands of dollars on adwords to make substantially more than they spent with adsense.  For a while this worked, but Google being a company that likes profit shut this down.  They’ve adjusted their algorithms now to the point where making money using arbitrage is very difficult.  You can try it but very few people succeed at it.  And if you get shut down one month you’ll be left with paying for your adwords bill with no adsense income.

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The easiest way to pay for your websites hosting costs is to sign up for an ad program.  There are a lot of them out there though.  So to get the most bang for your click what program should you go with?  Well the three big players are Google, Yahoo, and MSN with their contextual ad networks.  MSN has a pretty big sized ad network that pays pretty well, but both it and Yahoo are in their infancy when compared to the big G.  Google consistently outperforms Yahoo and MSN in terms of the ads being relevant to your site (meaning they have a large number of ads to display) and the payment per click.  In fact, Yahoo recently inked a deal with Google to share their ad networks with each other so that Yahoo can get in on some of Google’s action.  If you can’t beat them, and Yahoo certainly can’t beat Google (neither can MSN), join them.

Now that you have the major player picked the question revolves around your desire to dabble with some of the other players in the market.  In order to do so you’d have to make sure it’s not agains the Terms of Service for either provider to use another ad network on your website.  You will also need to realize that using another smaller ad provider will cost you a few clicks from your primary provider.  The main advantage to the secondary provider is that it allows you more ads per page (Google only allows 3 ads per page).  It also gives you a back up should you do something that your main provider deem agains their TOS and ban your account.

There are a number of smaller ad providers out there but the biggest one out there is called adbrite.  Using adbrite you can place ads on your page just like you can with Google.  An advantage with adbrite is that you can set the prices you want to be paid for the ads instead of just accepting whatever Google/Yahoo/MSN pay your for each of your clicks.

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So you’ve managed to make a website and gather a decent amount of traffic on the web.  Now you want to put some ads on the site, but the question is do you go with image ads or text ads?  The easy answer is text only ads.  Text only ads typically do better than image ads on a given website.  Though this performance is scewed because most people that use text only ads blend the ads into the content as well as possible to make the ads look like part of the content.  This is effectively tricking the reader into clicking the ads since they look like content.  So I like to think that the value on text ads is a bit skewed.

If the ad won’t be masquarading around as content on your site the answer is a bit more difficult.  I prefer to use a mix of text and image ads on my site in places that don’t interfere with the content.  The text ads give the reader more options to click on and these typically have higher pay per click.
The reason for using image ads is that they give an allure to your site.  Chances are you don’t have a site that’s ranked in alexa’s top 100,000 sites in terms of traffic.  Most sites that are highly trafficed will have an agreement set up with some third party ad placement agency that puts image ads on your site.  If you don’t have the traffic to attract such an agreement the image ads can give your users the illusion that you have more traffic than you do.  Perception is everything on the web.

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There are a lot of things to consider when using adsense. First and foremost, you need to experiment a lot. Because each website is different some things work well on one site and horribly on others. You’ll find a lot of good info on adsense from google (it’s in google’s best interest to see you succeed). You just need to search for it.

Some things to consider:

• Placement of ads
• Ad colors
• Blending ads into content/make them stick out
• size of ads
• number of ads on page
• what types of ads to use (link unit/video/text)

All these things will affect your earnings and there aren’t any straight forward answers. I find that people click my ads when the stick out more. You might not find the same. Play around with all of those things and be patient. Set up ads in different channels and over the course of 8-10 thousand impressions make an informed decision about what works best.

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Everyone asks quite often what is a good niche to get into when starting a website.  The truth of it is the best niche is the one you like the most and the one that you have a lot of knowledge about.  If you don’t like what your website is about you’ll have a hard time updating it.

But if you’re a glutton for punishment I can’t stop you from creating a website about something that you despise.  You can do a couple different things to determine what are high paying niches.  Google provides a tool for you to use to determine what keywords are the highest paying.  With it you can type in different keywords and see what the search volume for the keyword is.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

So you could, for example, look up a keyword for a site based on finance.  You would find that 16 million 6 hundred thousand searches for the month of september.  That’s a lot of volume so it’s bound to be a niche that advertisers are paying a lot of money for.  But that’s only half of equation.  You also need to find out how much competition there is for that keyword.  To find this you simply need to do a google search for that word.

In our case the word finance has 557 million results, that’s a lot of competition.  So sure you get a lot of searches but your website is very unlikely to show up in the first 100 pages of search results.  You’ll just have to keep looking for a good keyword to make a site around until you find one that has a good volue of searches with a small amount of competition.

The defacto answer is that health and finance are the best niches to be in, but unless you have a lot of advertising money you won’t get any traffic.

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It’s a common line of thought that the more you know about your website and the traffic that comes across your site the better you’ll be able to manage that traffic and achieve a higher percentage of conversions.  Since Google is in the advertising game through adsense it’s in their best interest to have higher click through percentages of their ads.  Unfortunately for Google they don’t get to determine how their ads are presented on web pages.

To help webmasters with this Google provides a few tools to help you learn more about your website and the traffic that visits it.

Google Analytics: probably the most well known tool that google provides to webmasters.  You simply sign up for an analytics account at analytics.google.com, Google will give you some javascript to paste into your site.  It’s important that you put it on every page since pages that you forget to put the code on will not show any statistics.  With analytics you can find out how many users visit your site, how they got to your site, what pages are viewed the most etc.  You can even integrate analytics with you adwords account to see how well your adwords ads are performing.

Adsense reports: if you’re signed up to use adsense you probably have a few channels set up in adsense to see which ads you’ve placed on your site are performing the best.  Every website is different and different ad placements work better than others.  The same goes for blending ads into the content (so the ads don’t stand out) vs making the ads stand out in the content, on some sites blending works better and on others it does not.

You should try this with pages that are similar.  Get a couple different ads and put them in different channels.  Blend one and make the other stand out.  That way you can track which method works better for your site.  Likewise you can do the same for ad placement.  Use a lot of different channels to determine what works best by tracking which channels provide higher CTR percantages.  Note: you’ll want to wait until you have at least ten thousand impressions per channel before deciding which style works better.

Google webmaster tools:  I came across this one by accident.  You go to google.com/webmasters/tools, there you can add sites to your account.  You’ll have to verify the sites by either adding a meta tag to the index page or you simply create a new file on your server.  Once done you’ll have access to the webmaster tools provided by google.  In the tools you can see the data that google has on your website.  You can view the sitemap google has registered for your site, you can see how many other sites link to your site.  You can see which of your pages are linked to the most, which of your pages have the highest pagerank.

You can also see which Google searches were the most common that showed your site.  And related to that you can see which searches displayed your site and the user clicked into your site from that search.

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