adsenseLane

While Adsense is a GREAT way to get income on your websites a recent post about how Adsense crawls your site reminded me about some issues that some might face when optimizing a site that uses Adsense.

The biggest thing is that you have to make sure that your site doesn’t have any blocks to the Adsense crawlers. This can come in a few forms

• First is the robots.txt – This is a little text file that helps web site crawlers find out more about your website and how to crawl it. It’s critical that you don’t have anything blocked. You can find a bit more about the robots.txt file at this site.
• Authentication or Logins – Sometimes your site may be passworded. I usually check the site by closing my browser, clearing my temporary files or cache and even get rid of any cookies. This ensures that not only can visitors to my site won’t be left out in the cold but the Adsense crawler will get to my content and serve the correct ads.
• Finally sessions and cookies – these are a bit more subtle and if you’re not sure if they are a problem you’re probably not going to have a problem. Using the clear cache/delete cookie method should be enough to find out if there is an issue.

Finally with any website take a quick look and see if your site is available for others to view by visiting your site right after you’ve published it. Not only will this let you see your handiwork it will let you know if there is a problem.

Adsense will be undergoing maintenance June 7th from 1PM to 5PM EDT.  There will still be ads served and everything should run as normal except you won’t be able to log in to your account.  You will still get credit for ads displayed on your sites during that time and ads will be relevant to your site also.  

If you want more information check the Inside Adsense blog from Google.

Many people are familiar with using Adsense or at least seeing ads from Adsense on a website.  If you just do a Google search you get the ads.  But often people forget where many of those ads come from.  In addition to several advertising networks feeding Google Adsense ads come from the Google Adwords program.  The Adwords program was started to allow pretty much anybody put advertising not only on Google but across the web on sites using Adsense.   It goes to say without Adwords there’d be no Adsense.

Adwords users bid to place their ad on search results and pages that are targeted for certain keywords.  The higher the bid the more traffic the ads will be displayed and clicked.  Advertisers can bid on how much they will pay and the higher paid ads will appear a bit more frequently.

While the system is rather simple getting it to work for advertisers can be a bit difficult. While you may have your ad displayed you may not have a compelling combination of keyword targeting, ad copy or target audience.  So it can be a bit frustrating to advertisers when they spend a fortune only to get minimal returns or even fraudulent clicks.  

This is why it is VITALLY important for Adsense users to make SURE that they are doing things by the book.  Not only can you loose your account.  Making minimal returns by keyword overloading, spamming or other black hat techniques will frustrate and drive away Adwords publishers.  The better focused and targeted your audience is with a consistent clicks and purchases will do wonders.  As your site becomes more and more successful and your keywords become more profitable the price for putting advertising for your targeted keywords will also increase.  

Understanding how Adwords fits into your Adsense site is key to making the most out of the work you do. 

With many websites using Adsense you’d think that everyone would be millionaires by now.  But that is not the case.  GoogMaster writes about why more people aren’t getting the results they expect from AdSense.

With the huge success Google’s Adsense has been reaping, there are now
only a handful of sites you’ll see that doesn’t feature Adsense on
their sites. Everyone is hoping that they could make huge earnings
from this pay-per-click affiliate program scheme Google has launched.

Read Five reasons , which makes your site unprofitable towards adsense