Thursday, 4. March 2010
Adsense – Getting the most out of your keywords
Adsense by Google can be a tremendous tool to the online entrepreneur. For those that prefer to write to earn easy internet money, Adsense is a staple of their income. This is because Google is respected in the fact that they deliver highly relevant results and trusted because they do not deliver malicious sites in their products.
But are you getting the most of your Adsense ads as a article writer, blogger, or webmaster? When you perform a periodic quality review of your site, are keyword relevant Adsense ads always being displayed? If keyword relevant ads aren’t being delivered %90 of the time, you could have two problems. The first and most costly is not having the right keyword combination’s in your content. The second, and easier to fix, is that you have not optimized your article, blog, or web page for the ads you want to display.
Adsense section targeting
Adsense section targeting allows you to suggest relevant content to Google. This is easily accomplished by adding a small amount of code to your your blog content, HTML, or PHP code. In layman terms, you tell Google which content is important and which isn’t. This is accomplished in two ways.
- The first is by telling Google which content to ignore. You do this by adding the code <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> This content is for Google Adsense to ignore… <!– google_ad_section_end –> . This is best used when there is a certain block of content that doesn’t match what your article, log, or web page is about. Be careful on how you use this as it is possible that it could exclude very profitable ads. I recommend using it only to exclude competitors. For example, if you are ghostwriter, you might write about certain aspects of ghostwriting that your competitors fall short in. You would definitely want to add this code to prevent your competitors ads to show up.
- Alternately, if you are a full service SEO consultant and you want to target your content writing skills, you would tell Google what to concentrate on. To do this, you would add the code <!– google_ad_section_start –> This is the content you want Google to focus on in your Adsense campaign <!– google_ad_section_end –> .
For the best results, you have to include general content and keyword specific content. For example, if your code looks like this: <!– google_ad_section_start –> Ghostwriter <!– google_ad_section_end –> your ads will all revolve around this specific keyword. If Google can not provide this ad,your site will provide a Public Service Ad (PSA). A PSA will not provide revenue if clicked on. To prevent this, make sure your start and end code wraps a large section of content. This will allow Google Adsense to deliver similar content over %90 of the time.
By following these simple rules found in the Google Adsense Targeting page, you can improve the profitability of your blog or website.
Posted in Adsense, Advertising Programs, Content Writing, How To... by -
Tuesday, 2. March 2010
Keyword selection for bloggers
If you are blogging to earn money using adsense, then you know how tough it can be to start making money in the beginning. After submitting your site to Bing, Google, and Yahoo you would think people would be able to find your site easy. Think again! You are competing against all of the other bloggers on the internet trying to do the same thing.
Sure there are tools to help optimize your site. And there are ways to use social networking and free traffic sites to bring in traffic. But how does one go about bringing in the targeted traffic that gets people clicking on your adsense ads? The answer is keyword research.
Keyword research with Google AdWords keyword tool
So let’s say you write a dating blog. It is safe to assume that there are may aspects to dating. But which ones should you put more time or emphasis on? First start by navigating to the Google AdWords keyword tool. Once there, type in dating, enter the verification code, and then click “get keyword ideas”.
The next page shows a list of keywords that are related to dating. As you can see, there are a lot of keyword combination’s for dating. There are two columns of relevance to compare. The first is Global Monthly Search Volume and the second is Advertiser Competition. As a niche market writer, you want the most amount of global search exposure and the most amount of advertiser competition.
Simply put, the more amount of Global searches, the better chance of someone finding your article for that key word. As far as advertiser competition, the more competition, the better price per click you will get paid. When choosing your blog theme and key words, using this technique will increase your odds of being profitable.
Site structure based on keywords
One last point about keyword research. It is important to know which keywords are valuable in writing articles. But it is also important to use these targetable key words in your site structure. Many popular blog platforms allow for canonical addressing. This means instead of your post address looking like ez-internet-money.com/p?123.php it looks like http://ez-internet-money.com/advertising-programs/make-easy-internet-money-with-adsense/. As you can see, the category is advertising programs and the title of the post is Make Easy Internet Money With Adsense. By adding simple canonical site structure, your site will perform much better for your targeted key words.
Related Articles:
Make Easy Internet Money With Adsense
Targeting Keyword Rich Text – Adsense Section Targeting
Google Adsense Keyword Value
Posted in Advertising Programs, Content Writing, How To..., Search Engine Optimization by -
Monday, 22. February 2010
The following is a guest post from Tom Demers and was posted at SEO Book.
One of the most pivotal aspects of driving large volumes of search traffic in most verticals is effectively targeting long tail keywords. While ranking for competitive phrases and developing link authority are certainly crucial aspects of SEO, much of ranking on long tail keywords is properly targeting and optimizing for them. A while ago Aaron made the following image as a conceptual example of how the relevancy algorithms may differ for different types of keywords:
Search Ranking Algorithms - Competitive Keywords
This article will outline a three step process for targeting long tail keywords.
Step 1: Build a Basket
The first (and possibly most important) consideration is determining which keywords to target. For this I think a three-step process is best:
Traditional Keyword Research
It’s always a good idea to do some idea generation and to get a feel for the possible variations of your specific targeted keyword by utilizing a keyword research tool. For the sake of the article, we’ll assume that we’ve selected our “head” or core keyword target, and that we’re attempting to rank an article for the key phrase and related key phrases. Three tools that I find particularly useful for this purpose are Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool, the SEO Book Keyword Tool, and my company’s Free Keyword Tool.
Using Your Own Analytics
Really the best source of keyword data for determining the long tail keywords you can target is your own data. This is powerful because it shows you a variety of keyword combination’s, the data is proprietary (your competitors didn’t pull the list from the same keyword tool you used, so they won’t be targeting the same keywords), and you have actual data both that you can rank for a given keyword, and you have an indication of how that keyword performs on your site. In Google Analytics, there a couple of reports you can pull to get this information (most analytics packages will provide you with similar capabilities). Drill down to traffic sources > keywords > non-paid:
Then you can create a filter for the head term. For the sake of this example we’ll say we’re targeting the phrase “long tail” and variations:
By creating the filter, we can see a variety of modifiers that the page and/or other content on our site are already driving. And, if we are in fact attempting to optimize an existing page for multiple keywords, we can utilize a content report to see what that page is already driving traffic for:
You can then see all of the queries driving traffic to that page. By analyzing the traffic and conversion statistics for that page, you can then start to feature more effective variations more prominently. The beauty of analyzing your own data lies in the fact that you can de-emphasize variations that don’t convert for your site.
Continually Iterate on Both Keyword Research and Keyword Analysis
Periodically, it’s a good idea to return to traditional keyword research, and to dig back into your analytics. This is particularly true if a concept or product is seasonal, but regardless the queries driving traffic to your site are bound to shift, and analyzing both the segment of keywords you’re targeting and the actual traffic to a given page can help to drive a tremendous amount of additional traffic to an individual page.
Step Two: Put It On The Page
Unless you coordinate an army of writers or build a venture-backed model around creating a piece of content for every phrase imaginable, you can’t create a piece of content for every phrase you want to rank for. As such you’ll have to effectively target long tail keywords by including the multiple phrases in your keyword bucket throughout the page:
- Varying the Title Tag and Header – In varying title tags and headers for SEO you are ensuring that your pages aren’t over-optimized and they include relevant long tail keywords you’ll want to target (rather than redundantly featuring the same keyword twice).
- Place Variations and Modifiers in Your Content - By researching the variations of a keyword you might want to include in your content, you can be aware of them as you craft content, and you can strategically place modifiers throughout your page’s content. For instance, it might not be natural for you write out the phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products” but if you know this is a phrase that drives some traffic, you can be sure to include phrases like “whether you are a retailer or an affiliate promoting products”. You’ll be using phrases like long tail keywords frequently enough that if the longer phrase is lower competition, you might not even need to include the exact phrase to rank for it. Note below that none of the ranking pages use the exact phrase “affiliate long tail keywords for promoting products”:
- Pay Attention to All of Your On-Page Elements – Be sure to work into your page’s headlines, bolded copy, alt attributes, title attributes, etc. the variations you’re targeting. By mixing up the words and phrases you use in these elements, you’re also ensuring your page isn’t over-optimized
Step Three: Building Links For Your Keyword Basket
Finally, even though many of your long tail keyword variations will rank on their own, you’ll want to develop some links with specific anchor text to these pages. You can do this in a few different ways:
- Vary Your Internal Links to a Page– Again, this allows you to avoid being “over-optimized,” and if you stick primarily to variations that contain the head keyword within the variation and append modifiers, rather than synonyms, you’re consistently transferring relevance for your core term.
- Use an Important Modifier in Your Headline – While your title tag is what’s seen by searchers, many people linking to your article will use your headline as anchor text. Using a variation here helps attract links for important modifiers
- External Links You Control- Things like company listings, directory listings, and nepotistic links often offer you the opportunity to control your own anchor text: while many times just leveraging internal links on an authoritative site is enough to rank, sometimes utilizing article submission Websites or other low-quality external linking sources with keyword-rich anchor text can help you to rank for mid to low-competition keywords.
Ultimately the best way to rank for long tail keywords is to build an authoritative Website and seed it with a lot of content, but on a page-by-page basis you can often leverage strategic keyword targeting and your own analytic data to help drive exponentially more traffic than you would focusing solely on the “head” keyword.
Tom Demers is the Director of Marketing with WordStream, a software company specializing in pay-per click software and keyword research and organization solutions for SEO. Tom is a frequent contributor at the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog.
Posted in Search Engine Optimization by Aaron Wall -
