Google Adsense has empowered web publishers of all shapes and sizes to make money from their web sites. Whether you own a hobby site that gets 100 visitors per day or a popular finance portal that is flooded with millions of visitors per month, you can benefit from the Google Adsense program.

Simply sign up for a free account, grab your Adsense code and paste it up on your website. Well, it sounds good anyway. In reality, that’s not the whole story. Maximizing your adsense earnings requires a little more care.

Fortunately, you can quickly increase your earnings by reading every word of this article. I will cover the basic necessities and also reveal advanced tips that you won’t find on every digital corner. So, if you’re looking to put more money in your pocket with a few tweaks of code, I urge you to read on.

As you are reading, keep in mind that Google is actually one of the best resources for finding information on Adsense optimization. Think it’s hard to believe that Google would give good advice? Well, it makes sense when you think about it. The more you make as a publisher, the more they will make. Google has a big incentive to help you perform well. Not to mention, they have tons of data to research what works best.

So, for much of my research, I took quite a few tips from Google. But don’t worry, there are also some advanced tips here that Google will probably never reveal to you.

Most Effective Ad Formats
In general, wider ad formats tend to outperform the taller ads. This is because the wider ads are much easier on the eye.

According to Google, the following ad formats result in the highest number of click-throughs:

• 336×280
• 300×250
• 160×600

Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com increased his revenues by 20 percent after placing the large rectangle (336×280) in the upper left corner, positioned within his articles.

Text links are another ad format that often work well. Using text link ads, you can create Adsense ads that blend in seamlessly with your navigation.

For an example of this, go to http://www.dealofday.com.

Tim Carter saw an 18 percent increase in his revenues after placing link units in the upper left corner under his site search bar.

Number of Ads
Multiple ad units can sometimes help optimize your performance. This is especially true for pages with lots of text, forums, and message boards.

However, it could possibly lower your revenues as well. When you show more ads, the ads that are placed lower on the page often have lower bid prices than the ones on top. Therefore, you must test the number of ads on a page to see what works best for you.

When using multiple ad units, make sure that the ad unit with the highest click-through rate appears first within your HTML code. This will ensure that your prime real estate is occupied by the highest paying ads. You can use CSS positioning to get your highest paying ads placed in the location with the highest CTR.

Colors
Ads that blend in with the colors of your site generate the highest click-through rates. In most cases, it is best to use the exact same color scheme for your ads that you use on your web site. To see some good examples of this, check out:

http://www.lockergnome.com
http://www.worldvillage.com

By using ads without background color or borders, your ads seamlessly integrate with your content.

Keep in mind that blue text links seem to perform best for Google Adsense. Blue is the assumed color of links on the Internet. Therefore, our pyschie expects links to be in blue.

However, you may want to rotate your colors every once in a while to spice things up. This way, your visitors don’t get used to your ads, which can cause banner-blindness.

Ad Placement
Just like in real estate, location is the key to success with Adsense. Fortunately, Google provides us with a heat map, showing the best spots for ads.

One of the best places for your Adsense ads are at the top-left of the page. Because people are used to seeing navigation on the left side of the page, the eye naturally gravitates to this section of your web site.

Many studies have been performed to see how the eye travels across a web page. You can see a demonstration at EyeTrack III. Knowing how people view your web site will help immensely when optimizing the placement of your ads.

In addition, you should also place your Adsense ads next to rich content and navigation elements. These ads often do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. You can see examples of this at EzineArticles.com and Lockergnome.com.

As you can see, these sites have placed their adsense ads next to search boxes and navigation links.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t change the layout of your site to fit the ads, but rather use the ad formats that best fit with your site layout.

Images
Many publishers have started using images around their ads. As a result, many of them have doubled their revenues.

One of the most successful implementations of this techniques is to use the 728×90 leaderboard with 4 thumbnail-sized images above each ad. You can see some good examples at:

sg-God
DrawAPig

Of course, you can’t use images of blinking arrows because this would be enticing visitors to click. However, it is perfectly acceptable to place related pictures beside your ads.

For example, if you have a page about laptops, you could place a leaderboard with 4 laptop images above each ad. In this way, you are using images to complete the story.

In fact, Google is currently testing an ad format that would blend images together with related text ads. It seems that even Google thinks that images are a good idea to bring attention to ads. To see an example of the Google ads in beta, go to SearchEngineJournal.com

Forums
If you have a forum, I hope you are monetizing it with Adsense. Many people include Adsense within their web site, but when it comes to their forum, they simply let the ball drop. Forums can definitely be an extra source of income when optimized properly.

To find out about the best placement for Adsense within forums, I went to Google for some advice. To my surprise, they also have a heat map for forums.

One of the best ways to monetize your forum is to place Adsense directly within the threads. To see an example of this, go to Digital Point Forums. Google advises that you place a skyscraper above the fold on the left side of your forum and they also suggest placing a leaderboard directly below the top navigation and below the first post.

If you are looking for additional ad space, you can place a horizontal link unit near the top of the forum, just below the header.

The next Adsense tactic is one that isn’t talked about much. However, when used appropriately, it can be extremely powerful.

Newsletters
If you own a newsletter list, then you can easily leverage that list in order to earn more Adsense revenue. Whenever you send out your newsletter, simply link to an article on your site within the email. By doing this, you can draw people to your Adsense pages and easily increase your Adsense revenue.

This is one of the best things about building your own list. You are able to direct traffic to any place at any time.

In the end, the key to increased revenues is testing. Not all sites are the same. You have to experiment to find out what works best for your particular site. What works for one site may not work for another. Only by testing can you find out which styles encourage your visitors to respond.

By Kim Roach

Are English speaking websites based in the US simply insular and uncaring about foreign web traffic or are we actually Xenophobic?

Xenophobia - a phobic attitude toward strangers - comes from the Greek words xenos, meaning “foreigner”, “stranger”.

Trolling through the “referrers” section in my web site traffic logs routinely shows hundreds of Google foreign language searches. Those foreign language search referrals usually total just slightly more than the combined total of Yahoo and MSN English language search referrals. So doesn’t it make sense to pay more attention to foreign language search in SEO than to fiddle with Yahoo and MSN optimization? My traffic logs routinely show hundreds of translation tool referrals.

Those referrals come from foreign language searchers that REALLY want to read the pages. Foreign language visitors who don’t know about online translation tools (like Google’s) will leave the search result pages without visiting your site. Why not provide your pages in the most common European and Asian languages with your text in their native language already? Look in your logs for the following referrer URL:

http://64.233.179.104/translate_c

with URL’s of your own site appended. This query at “Google English” is a request by a foreign language user for a translation of that page on your site. The most common of them are from Google.es (Spain) and Google.de (Germany) and Google.pt (Portugal). Last month there were nearly 1,000 of these queries from Google translation tools in my logs. Check that tool out here:

http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en

This translation - or “Language Tools” page at Google is helpful in escaping our insular attitudes about English language search by showing us that Google currently supports 34 languages and hosts servers in 141 countries - literally from A to Z. http://www.Google.ae (United Arab Emirates) to http://www.Google.co.zm (Zambia)

Google has 117 languages listed on that page, but they’ve buried a few ringers in there with “Elmer Fudd”, “Klingon”, and “Pig Latin” to throw linguists for a loop. While it’s interesting to use those funny options, clicking the “I’m Feewing Wucky” on the “Elmer Fudd” language produces the same results as does the English language search, it’s just cuter with the letters “L” and “R” replaced with “W’s” on the search page.

http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/

But we need to look at the fundamental reason that Google offers this “Language Tools” page and the machine translation there. It is because web site owners in the U.S. don’t offer multiple languages on their own sites.

While it is not uncommon to see a row of four to six flags representing the top few languages on many European based sites (especially Italy, Spain and France based companies) - it is actually rare to see multiple language options on U.S. based business sites.

There are manifold reasons for this lack of communication by English speaking countries with the rest of the world. The top reason is that we simply don’t need to know other languages to live our daily lives in this country, so we rarely think of using other languages online. While English is a primary language spoken around the world, including Canada, Australia, India, Britain and is a second language spoken by millions of primarily foreign language speakers.

While it is common to visit major cities in Japan, Italy, Mexico and dozens of metropolitan cities around the planet without fear that we’ll be unable to find English speaking hoteliers, restaurateurs, and even cabbies - it is an arrogant expectation. I’ve been to each of those countries and didn’t need any Japanese, Italian or Spanish languag skills while on either business or pleasure.

But we’ve got to be realistic if we are to take part in the global medium of the web. Those web pages are viewable by an estimated 700 million people around the world and millions of those would happily visit and read your web site if it were available in the world’s top languages and indexed in foreign search engines. So why not provide that option?

Major corporate web sites in the U.S. will inevitably require polished human translation of their major web pages, with variations for international tastes and preferences - most small and medium business sites cannot afford that option.

This leaves machine translation as the best remaining option. While it is possible for any site visitor to use translation tools online to convert your English language text into foreign tongues, it sends the visitor away from your site to the translation service. Not ideal.

The best option is to use translation software to put those foreign language variations on your own site and host them from your own server in the languages you offer. The reason to host them is, very simply, that if you provide machine translated foreign variants of all your pages, they will be crawled by foreign search engines and indexed and ranked on European and Asian search engines.

The web audience in China was roughly estimated at just over 100 million in 2005 and is expected to balloon in the near future. Simply being indexed for Chinese language searches and reasonably ranked could increase traffic for U.S. sites dramatically. The European audience is fragmented with many more language options - the main representative languages on the web are Spanish, French, Portugese, German & Italian, while Chinese, Korean and Japanese make up the bulk of the remaining web audience. Those eight languages are offered in popular machine translation software packages.

If a site has already been optimized for English language search, the SEO will have included the most important keywords. While machine translation is not entirely reliable for proper sentence structure and grammar once translated, it at least gets most words and many word combinations correct. Content sites, who often rely on advertising for income, would love to see the extra pageviews and ad clicks coming from foreign visitors reading their pages in their native language.

Once a content site owner sees their largest foreign audience trends (through web traffic analytics statistics), they can fine-tune their SEO for individual languages and actually pay for professional translation and foreign language SEO of the most profitable pages. But simply getting a content site indexed by search engines in more than eight new countries will bring waves of new visitors and increase advertising income substantially.

By Mike Banks Valentine
Mike Banks Valentine operates WebSite101.com and performs ethical search engine optimization and press release optimization & distribution online. If you’ve got news you can rank at the top for your search phrases.

Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages. However, before these pages were placed in the index, they were each crawled by a special spider known as the GoogleBot. Unfortunately, many web masters do not know about the internal workings of this virtual robot.

In fact, Google actually uses a number of spiders to crawl the Web. You can catch these spiders by examining your log files.

This article will attempt to reveal some of the most important Google spiders, their function, and how they affect you as a web master. We’ll start with the well-known GoogleBot.

GoogleBot
Googlebot, as you probably know, is the search bot used by Google to scour the web for new pages. Googlebot has two versions, deepbot and freshbot. Deepbot is a deep crawler that tries to folow every link on the web and download as many pages as it can for the Google index. It also examines the internal structure of a site, giving a complete picture for the index.

Freshbot, on the other hand, is a newer bot that crawls the web looking for fresh content. The Google freshbot was implemented to take some of the pressure off of the GoogleBot. The freshbot recalls pages already in the index and then crawls them for new, modified, or updated pages. In this way, Google is better equipped to keep up with the ever-changing Web.

This means that the more you update your web site with new, quality content, the more the Googlebot will come by to check you out.

If you’d like to see the Googlebot crawling around your web property more often, you need to obtain quality inbound links. However, there is also one more step that you should take. If you haven’t already done so, you should create a Google Sitemap for your site.

Creating a Google sitemap allows you to communicate with Google, telling them about your most important pages, new pages, and updated pages. In return, Google will provide you with some valuable information as well. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. This allows you to pinpoint problems and fix them so that you can gain increased exposure in the search results.

The next Google bot in our lineup is known as the MediaBot.

MediaBot - used to analyze Adsense pages
useragent: Mediapartners-Google

MediaBot is the Google crawler for Adsense Publishers. Mediabot is used to determine wich ads Google should display on Adsense pages.

Google recommends that webmasters specifically add a command in their robots.txt file that grants Mediabot access to their entire site. To do this, simply enter the following code into your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

This will ensure that the MediaBot is able to place relevant Adsense ads on your site.

Keep in mind that ads can still be shown on a page if the MediaBot has not yet visited. If that is the case, the ads chosen will be based on the overall theme of the other pages on the site. If no ads can be chosen, the dreaded public service announcements are displayed instead.

There is a strong debate over whether or not the MediaBot is giving websites with Adsense an advantage in the search engines.

Even Matt Cutts has confirmed that the Adsense Mediabot has indexed webpages for Google’s main index.

He states, “Pages with AdSense will not be indexed more frequently. It’s literally just a crawl cache, so if e.g. our news crawl fetched a page and then Googlebot wanted the same page, we’d retrieve the page from the crawl cache. But there’s no boost at all in rankings if you’re in AdSense or Google News. You don’t get any more pages crawled either.”

Matt Cutts claims that your website does not get any advantage by using Adsense. However, in my mind, simply getting your site updated in and of itself is an advantage.

This is very similar to Google Analytics, which also promotes a slightly higher degree of spider activity.

Those who run Google Analytics on their site can expect additional spider activity.

However, you certainly shouldn’t depend on any of these tools for getting your site indexed. The key to frequent spidering is having quality inbound links, quality content, and frequent updates.

Have images on your site? If so, you have likely been visited by our next Google spider, the ImageBot.

ImageBot - used to crawl for the Image Search
useragent: GoogleBot-Image

The Imagebot prowls the Web for images to place in Google’s image search. Images are ranked based upon their filename, surrounding text, alt text, and page title.

If you have a website that is primarily image based, then you would definitely want to optimize your images to receive some extra Google traffic.

On the other hand, some web sites may not benefit from Google image search. In most cases, the traffic from the Image search engine is very low quality and rarely converts into buyers. Many people are often just looking for images that they can swipe. So, if you want to save some bandwidth, use your robots.txt file to block ImageBot from accessing your image directory.

One of the few exceptions I would make is if you have a site dedicated to downloadable images.

Our final bot is completely dedicated to the Google Adwords program.

AdsBot - Checks Adwords landing pages for quality
useragent: AdsBot-Google

AdsBot is one of Google’s newest spiders. This new crawler is being used to analyze the content of advertising landing pages, which helps determine the Quality score that Google assigns to your ads.

Google uses this Quality score in combination with the amount you are willing to bid to determine the position of your ads. Therefore, ads with a high quality score can rank higher even if other advertisers are paying more than you.

This is one of Google’s many efforts to ensure that they are delivering the best results to their users.

Can you still block being spidered? Of course, but it will lower your overall Adwords quality score, which could end up lowering the positioning of your ads. If possible, it is best to give AdsBot complete access to your site.

Today’s Google bots are becoming more advanced all the time. However, nothing beats relevant, quality, updated content. Deliver that and the search engines will eat it up.

By Kim Roach