Webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. Thats why theyre using it to go after the high paying keywords. Theyve bought the lists that tell them what these keywords are and theyve used various other methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these high paying pages on their websites, the advertising money they expected to see isnt rolling in. Whats wrong
Well, having those pages is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is an entirely different thing and is often whats lacking. To get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, youve got to optimize site navigation.
Take a moment to think about how visitors use your website. After landing on a certain page, theyll often click to another page that sounds interesting. They get there by way of the other links that appear on the page they landed on. How you enable visitors to move about your website is what is meant by the term, Site Navigation.
A typical website has a menu of links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitors attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of your website. Links labeled Free Resources or Download ebooks are generally good attention-grabbers.
This same site navigation logic applies to driving traffic to your high paying pages. I have some pages on my website that get a lot of traffic from search engines, but the earnings on these pages are very low. I use cleverly-labeled links to get visitors off these pages and onto my higher earning pages. Its a great and inexpensive way to turn cheap clicks into real dollars.
Ready, Set, Test
Before you begin testing, youve got to have two things: something to track and compare; and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. For fast results, select a few of your highly visited pages.
Next think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to click on a link to one of your high earning pages. Thatll help you come up with a catchy description for the link. And remember, you can use graphics to grab your visitors attention. Be creative!
And remember, its all about location, location, location. Once youve come up with the attention-grabbing description, youve got to identify the perfect spot on your page for positioning the descriptive link to your high paying page.
Spend some time visiting other websites to see how theyre maximizing site navigation. For example, using a Hot Pages list or a Most Read Articles list are common menu selections.
Then let the testing begin. Try putting different text on different pages. That way youll get a feel for what works and what doesnt. Mix things up a bit put links on the top of the page and the bottom.
Its now all a matter of testing and tracking, and testing and tracking until you find the site navigation setup that works best!
Bas de Baar is the author of the e-book Analyzing Adsense For Niche Websites. To learn how you can increase online profits by testing and analyzing, go to
If youve started using Adsense as a way to increase advertising income, but the numbers just arent adding up to what you expected, the problem might be with the ads themselves. If the ads being generated by Googles Adsense arent relevant to your website, visitors wont click on them. And, no click-y, no money. Its that simple. And its a simple situation to fix.
One way to know if the ads are working is to monitor the click-through-rate (CTR) on a page. If its low, its usually an indication that once a visitor arrived at your page using a certain keyword, that visitor did not find any ads relevant to that keyword. And unfortunately for you, the visitor found no reason to click on the ads.
How do I know this It happened on my website. On one of my sites, I had a page dedicated to PHP programming (a programming language). The page had a low CTR. Upon further examination of the page, I noticed that not one of the ads was related to programming or even to technology.
What I did notice was that the ads were related to guitars. Guitars I thought to myself, What relevance do guitars have to PHP programming And I imagined visitors to my site wondered this as well.
After studying the ads, I noticed that one word seemed to keep jumping out at me. The word was strings as in guitar strings. Well strings are used in programming too, but Google was not able to make this distinction which is why it was generating guitar ads!
The solution to this problem was simple. I removed from my webpage the words string and strings (or I just used another word in place of string or strings). After Google found this page again and updated its view of it, the guitar ads were replaced with relevant ads. And best of all CTR on this page immediately increased and so did my advertising income!
If you have a page with a low CTR, you may need to tweak your text so Adsense generates ads that are more relevant to the page. When making these types of changes to your webpages, use the same ideas you use for search engine optimization. Why
Because Google uses the same logic to determine the appropriate Adsense ads to display on your page as it does to determine if your article should rank high for blue widgets.
Some areas on your page that might need a bit of text tweaking include:
- The title of the page
- The H1-tags used in the page
- The number of occurrences of the keywords in the text of the article
- Changing the filename (this can be very effective, but only do this for new pages that are not yet in the search engines or you risk losing traffic)
One word of advice: Dont forget that your keywords determine your search engine rankings so take small steps when changing keywords.
And remember, the only ads that will bring you the extra Adsense income youre looking for are relevant ads!
Bas de Baar is the author of the e-book Analyzing Adsense For Niche Websites. To learn how you can increase online profits by testing and analyzing what will work for YOU, go to: