Monday, May 15, 2006

Text and Images

Google Adsense offers two main kinds of contextual advertising, Text and Images (Or both if you wish)

Choosing which to use can play a very big role in you site.

Text is good for inline advertising, making teh advert look embedded in your text, also if you choose one such as a wide sky scraper it will show four different advertisements relating to your site, which gives you a 4x chance of displaying an advert of interest to your viewer.

Image adverts are useful because they are more eyecatching, though they are not much use as inline adverts teh old adage 'an image is worth a thousand words comes' comes to the fore. An image is much better at directly influencing a persons emotions, so if used correctly may help increase clickthroughs.

If you reffer back to the heatmap this would be a good place to point out placement of different kinds of adverts.

A text advert will need to be in a place where a viewer will read the text, whereas an image may capture someones eye wherever it is on the page. Judging by this it may help to place text adverts in the high view areas, and banners in places where the eye does not take in as much detail. in all cases the best way to see what works best is simply to play about with it. Different things may work for your site than what will work for others!

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Adsense Content

The adverts in adsense will always try to be relevent to the content on your site, I wrote breifly about this before but I will go into more detail here on how to fix problems that crop up with this!

The main problem I discovered was when I put adsense into my general blog Ramblings of an Office Worker . Because there was no specific topic in my blog adsense tended to advertise blog type things on my site, these are not very efficient, especially if you are advertising startup blogging sites on one of the worlds leading blogging sites. A fairly quick workaround for this is to make your writing more specific, even better, make several blogs focusing on each different area of content. Unfortunately this doesnt always works, especially if the blog is just somewhere to rant or pour your heart out every day.

Another way to do this is just make sure you use keywords around the advert, making them relevant to the kind of adverts you want to appear on your site.

If your site is a standalone site you should not really suffer from this problem, since the site you made will be focused on the content it should stay fairly accurate!

Monday, May 08, 2006

Match Your Colour To Your Content

This may seem rather ambiguous but colour is an incredibly important tool in your site. The best way to have people read your adverts is to make sure your site captures a viewers attention, and colour is a great way of doing this. Take two examples, an extreme sports site and a meditation site, two fairly extreme ends of the spectrum.

So your reader knows that they have found what they are looking for the colour on your site should match the topic, so extreme sports could ahve a black and orange layout, that subliminally suggests excitement and danger, whereas a meditation site could have a calming pale blue or yellow, this is a more relaxed kind of colour scheme. This may not seem like much but if the viewer of your site FEELS like they have found something relevant then they are more likely to read on.

The great thing about this is that it is nearly instantaneous, the viewer doesnt have to read any text to be attracted to your site, so it makes it just that little bit more likely that they will stay.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

High Paying Keywords

You will regularly see places offering lists of high paying keywords, saying you could make millions out of these, do not be fooled. Although there are some keywords in google that do pay extremely handsomely they tend not to be clicked on quiet so much.

Remember that it is better to have a high quality site with lots of repeat visitors than a site based around an obscure subject which may only attract one or two visitors a day.

If your site is based on a high paying, obscure, key word it may help if you make it one section of a larger site, that way you can get the occasional click on teh high paying keyword but you can still pull in a large quantity of visitors to the rest of your site!