Ever wondered how to select the best keywords for your Adsense websites? Your focus is earning money as well as attracting organic traffic towards your website. Here is what you need to know while choosing a keyword, a scientific study that maps the ideal keywords for your next upcoming adsense website.
We shall first study how to choose keywords that lead to more Adsense money.
CPC - Advantages and Drawbacks
What does CPC indicate?
When we think of high paying keywords, the first thing that pops up in our mind is CPC. CPC (Cost Per Click) is the maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. Higher the CPC of a particular keyword, more will be the payouts you can expect by targeting that keyword in your AdSense websites. You can get the most accurate CPC from the source itself - Google.
However, CPC is not the only factor that tells the profitability of a keyword. There are many other factors that you should consider.
Drawbacks of CPC
- What if there are no advertisers bidding on a keyword having high CPC? Obviously, it means no one is going to pay you that high for a click.
- What if the traffic on the keyword is technical enough and does not click on ads (banner blindness)?
- What if Google gets loads of traffic on that keyword, enough to fulfill the desires of high paying advertisers? In this case, Google will only throw remaining peanuts towards you.
Obviously, Google will like to keep all the high paying ads within its own pages. So you see, CPC just shows you a small part of the entire picture. We shall explore the rest part of the picture...
Number of Sponsors - The Most Important Figure
Keywords with high CPC do not always come with high number of advertisers. There are many keywords in Google's Adwords system that have a high price, but almost no or very less number of advertisers. Now, if you build a web page or website around a keyword on which no one is bidding, Google will try to fill the ad blocks with ads of the related keywords rather than the high paying keyword you were initially targeting. There is no guarantee that ads of the related keywords will be good converters. Therefore, there is every likelihood that your clicks will be passed through SmartPricing Filter, eventually resulting in lesser payouts.
Hence, it is important to see the number of sponsors bidding on the keyword in question. If there are more the advertisers, there will be more competition among them to get the top position. This means that there will be more revenue per click that they are willing to share with you. In other words, more sponsors mean more people fighting against one another other to pay you more Adsense money.
Number of clicks on an Ad
It refers to the number of clicks an advertiser gets when his ad appears on the top. If the number of clicks and number of advertisers is less, just ignore those keywords, no matter what their CPC is. However, if the clicks per month are lower than expected, but the number of advertisers is a good one - it's the right choice for you. Such keywords are called "Niche AdSense' keywords." Here the word 'niche' is used in commercial context. This means that Google is not able to generate traffic on such keyword ads. This makes it difficult for it to exhaust the advertising budgets of the advertisers. Therefore, in order to meet its targets, Google happily shares high paying ads with you, resulting in more payouts. Try to find such "Niche AdSense' keywords."
Coming to Higher number of clicks - It indicates:
Either the traffic segment is ignorant about the online advertising concepts, and click on these ads unknowingly. This means you will experience higher CTR on your ads when placed at appropriate place. You don't have to put in much efforts to fight banner blindness.
Or, the traffic is highly commercial and willing to purchase the advertised product over internet. This means that there are very little chances of your facing the SmartPricing phenomenon.
Number of clicks along with the other stats like Number of sponsors and CPC, can enable you to make more wise decisions while choosing keywords for your AdSense content.
Bidding Quality
It's important to see the pattern in which people are bidding on a keyword. Suppose there are 400 advertisers bidding on a keyword. The top 20 of these are paying something like $15 per click, while the rest of them pay somewhere between $2 and $0.05. Now you might have found some decent tools that give you the average of top 3 or top 5 positions which is good, but not good enough. The point is that although the top 20 advertisers are paying higher, but the rest 380 advertisers are paying quite low. There is a high probability of your getting the ads of those 380 sponsors. Therefore, the average of the top 20 advertises can be really misleading. The solution to this problem is discussed in the later part of this page.
We have enough Adsense money now. Let's build some traffic on your website.
Traffic Building for AdSense:
Choosing Niche Keywords
Niche keywords are the keywords that are highly searched by the web surfers, and are rarely used by your competitors. Less competition means more traffic to your website. Targeting ten niche keywords is easier and more fruitful that targeting a highly competitive keyword. Traffic from niche keywords when directed to a relevant page increases your CTR and conversion ratio.
Determining Competition
People generally take the number of results returned by search engines as the number of pages competing on a keyword. But it is wrong. The Search Engine Results get irrelevant after 10 - 15 pages. Irrelevancy further increases with the depth. The pages that have the keyword dumped in a corner are not competing against you, but search engines will still list them. In fact they have to.
It is assumed that if a webmaster is targeting a web page with a particular keyword, the keyword is used in the title as well as in the anchor text linking to that webpage. Such a page is listed higher by the search engines as it is dedicated to what you searched for. So how to filter out the most relevant results? Check it out!
Inanchor intitle and Its Precision - The Solution
In Google, you can easily determine the EXACT number of pages that are competing against you. You can precisely list out the pages that are using a particular keyword in their page titles or in the anchor texts linking to them.
The query can be applied as follows: intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword.
For example, if the keyword is "hair treatment", the formula will be used in the following manner: intitle:hair inanchor: hair intitle: treatment inanchor: treatment. This figure gives you the exact number of pages that are ACTUALLY Targeting with these keywords, and not those that have just created a page or a small paragraph on the same topic. Google emphasizes on Anchors and Page titles. That's the reason, it supports such a search query.
We shall now discuss some other traditional ways to determine competition.
R/S Ratio
Here, R refers the number of competitor websites for a particular keyword as per the search result of the search engine. And S refers the number of searchers using that keyword while searching their queries. This means that for better results, you have to choose the keywords with lower R/S ratio.
R/S ratio becomes polluted when someone uses the number of results as the number of competing websites. As explained above, counting the number of results as the number of competing pages is the biggest mistake one can make while choosing a keyword. However, the figure becomes quite useful when inanchor intitle is used to create R/S.
KEI Analysis
KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a formula for measuring the effectiveness of a keyword. The formula was devised by Sumantra Roy. However, this figure also depends upon the number of searches and competition, but with a difference. This formula analyzes the number of searches and competition in such a way that if the searches increase, KEI increases; and if the competition increases, KEI decreases. Higher the KEI, more profitable will be the keyword. However, it becomes polluted when the number of search results are used as the number of competitors.
Determining Traffic
Determining traffic for a keyword is quite important before targeting it. Along with the competition stats, it lets you make out the niches present in any industry. Besides, it lets you predict (to some extent) how much traffic you can expect if you promote a website around a particular keyword. There are two known sources for determining traffic. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now a part of Yahoo Search Engine) and WordTracker. When talking about accuracy, Wordtracker monitors the queries on some meta search engines that actually render it inaccurate . Reason? There is no known stat about how much of the community you are targeting is searching on those meta search engines. However, it's a good tool to make out the niches.
In my opinion, Yahoo owned Overture gives you more accurate stats than Wordtracker. This is for the reason that Overture is a PPC engine. It can show you how many people are searching for a particular term on its vast network. A network which is bigger than any Meta Search Engine. Still, it is not that accurate, but at least better than Wordtracker. The tools that are predicting Google Searches for you are just doing guess work. No one knows the algorithm they use.
Summing It Up
Profitability of a keyword depends more on the number of sponsors than CPC. Number of clicks and bidding quality can't be determined by just monitoring the first 3 or 8 places. It can be rightly assessed by taking out the average of all the 400 sponsors bidding on a keyword. Sounds very tiring for keyword research, right? Well, Keyword Country (http://www.keywordcountry.com) gives you not only the average of all the sponsors bidding on a keyword, but also the Max CPC from Google, Clicks per month from Google, No. of Advertisers present in Google Adwords system for a keyword, Competitors through inanchor intitle, R/S ratio and KEI with inanchor intitle, Traffic through Overture, and much more. All this enables you to make a wise decision while choosing the keywords.
Now you just have to create pages, and leave the engrossing keyword research on Keyword Country - The First Keyword Search Engine
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
AdSense Secrets: Choosing the Best Keywords for AdSense
Monday, May 12, 2008
Don't Get Caught With Google Adsense Click Fraud
Many web site owners are getting their Google Adsense account terminated when they have done nothing wrong to deserve the punishment. Considering the money that they are getting from Adsense, they would certainly want to get back into it.
Considering the money to be made with Adsense, it is no wonder that they would want to get back into it.
It is that same consideration why the Google Adsense click fraud is thought of and why many people are getting into it.
Click fraud is the act of clicking on ads for the purpose of costing the advertiser money. It is simply the same as paying out cash for false leads. Many people website owners are aware of this fraud and are sharing the same sentiment that this is the one big problem that Adsense is facing.
How do you prevent being involved in this fraud?
Majority of web hosts are offering access logs. Once this is offered to you, it is necessary that you hand it over to Google as well. This allows them to look for any suspicious activity on your site. Problems like this are very serious and giving it to them is saying that you would want to help them in any way you can in solving the problem.
It can also help if you have a click monitoring software. If you do not have one yet, you should try and get one. There is absolutely no major factor preventing you from having one because most of this software is free.
As usual, all the information you have received should be turned over to Google. This is showing Google that you too are fighting against click frauds and is in no way a part of it.
Study your server logs and watch for any activity that seems suspicious. Report anything that you may find odd, may it big or small thing.
You may want to consider disabling ads for your own IP address and local geographic area. This will certainly prevent accidents and will not make Google mistake another user as you. You can do through a htaccess file. This will avoid Google mistaking as clicking on your own ads and be kicked out because of it.
Keep your Adsense off on pop ups and pop unders. Your ads should not be displayed on content sites that promote illegal activity or tampering of the legal rights of other people or business. Included in this are the content that is considered adult and gambling ones. If you think that you may be breaking this rule, immediately remove your content or Adsense from the web page.
Be truthful and confess up to Google about times when you might have clicked on your own as, whether accidentally or intentionally. Or the times when you have done something that is against the Terms of Service that they are implementing. Be honest about anything that you may have done that is wrong. Confessing is way better than Google learning about it eventually. It would mean eventual termination and no getting back what you have worked so hard for.
Do not tell your family or friends about Adsense on your website. Chances are they may start clicking on them to help you make money without you knowing it. They may be doing more harm to you than help by trying it in the first place.
If ever someone you know chanced upon your Adsense, make sure they understand that they cannot click on your ads under any circumstances. It would be wise to brief them on important things about Adsense and what not to do with them.
Most pay per click networks have different measures in hand to protect website owners against click frauds. Other search engines can track more than 50 data points, IP address, browser’s information, user’s session info and pattern recognition. They also have “systems” available that detects fraud. Not to mention the specialized teams monitoring how things are going and helping advertisers stop click frauds.
Google offers suggestion on how to avoid click fraud. Using “negative keywords” can be used to keep your Adsense showing on products and services that are in no way related to yours. Adding tracking URLs to your links so you can track the traffic coming from Google.
Do not be caught in the Google click fraud. Be aware and be wary.
5 Ways To Improve Your Adsense Earnings
If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.
The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.
Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.
1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.
2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.
3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.
4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.
5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.
These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.
Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.
Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.
If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.
Friday, May 2, 2008
What Works:
1) Content is King
It is still the King in 2008. In fact, original content has become more
and more important. Sites that do not have good amount of unique
content will be weeded out slowly, not only by Google, but by the
whole blogosphere. Would you rather bookmark and revisit a blog
with full unique, useful content or a blog with duplicated junky
content? Or a blog that simply spreads affiliate links on all possible
words? The answer is clear, Content Is Still The King In 2008!
2) Theme-based Blog
This is the next big thing that is going to hit the market in 2008. Last
year, we have seen many successful implementations of such kinds of
blogs. Instead of simply a blog, or a collection of daily musings, many
blogs are setup to closely focus around a theme. For example, if you
are writing about gardening, what you need to do with your blog is to
have a comprehensive, closely focused content about gardening, and
only gardening. Forget about setting up a pond in your garden. Forget
about the benefits of practicing Tai Ji in the garden. Focus on
“gardening”.
3) Niche In A Niche
Gardening is a niche. Bonsai gardening is a niche in a niche. If you
plan to start a blog in 2008, you need to consider setting up the blog
within a niche, not on a niche. The competition has been furious.
Most popular niches have already been filled. Now, people are
moving into niche in a niche. It is a race on who gets to root into a
niche first and establish a name. So, try to think if there is a niche in a
niche that complements your current venture. You might want to
start a launch into a niche in a niche.
4) Contextual Link Exchange
This will rock 2008! Many services have been setup for this purpose.
Contextual link exchange happens this way: You are writing about
Bonsai gardening. You see someone else writing about Bonsai
gardening. You write about that blog and give a link to it. You then
email the blogger about the link, and ask if he will review your blog
and give you a link back on his blog. Both of you are talking about
bonsai gardening. Both of you write a post and give a link to each
other. It is so natural that Google is going to put weight on this type of
linking. Contextual Link Exchange will stay in 2008.
5) Video Blogs
Yeah, this is going to rock 2008 as well. If you are setting up a blog,
and you want heavy amount of targeted visitors, use video. Write
some content and capture some videos. Post the video on YouTube,
Google Video and every place that allows video. Embed the video in
your blog. If you do it correctly and frequently, you can gather a mass
of loyal repeat visitors. You can also get links easily. Video is one of
the easiest way to link bait! This will help you build up your ranks in
Google and give you even more free traffic from the search engines.
Try to use as much video as possible in your blog, because this will be
the trend for 2008!
To help you get started with video, I am giving away a free bonus,
called CamStudio. This software is used widely by internet marketers
and bloggers alike to create on-screen video. You can use it to create
tutorials or anything you like. It records into .AVI format, and you can
convert it into .SWF format right from the recorder itself. Then you
can embed into your blog or post it on YouTube and Google Video.
6) Outsource Content Writing
This has become popular. Successful bloggers are not building one
blog. They are building a network of blogs. We call it a Blog Empire!
We do not write the content ourselves. We outsource the content
writing. We do, however, tell the writers what to write and what not
to write. We do, as well, edit the content to add in some passion and
personalization. With the right outsourcing, we are able to manage
not one, but more than 30 blogs at one time, and still have time to
research and develop new blogs!
Now I have pointed out 4 things that will not work and 6 things that
will work very well in 2008, and there are a lot of hints in the words.
Thing changes, accept the change. Implement the change and ride the
trend. If you follow the above suggestions, you have all it takes to
make money blogging with Adsense in 2008!
What It Takes To Make Money Blogging With Adsense
More and more people are entering the world of blogging,
and many of them are putting their hands on Google Adsense to
generate a part-time income.
Some of them made it successfully and become full-time blogger.
They are able to climb to the top of the Adsense ladder and cash their
tens-of-thousands checks, laughing all the way to the bank, while
others are still scratching their head in dismay trying to figure out
what went wrong.
This special report is written specifically to outline what works and
what doesn’t. Without further ado, let’s get started.
What Doesn’t Work:
1) Duplicated Content
It surprises me when I receive emails asking me where to scrap
content to make money from Adsense. Don’t waste your time. Google
is penalizing on duplicated content. If your blog is filled with content
copied from article directories or free-to-copy articles, you will end up
in the recycle bin of not only Google Search Engine, but the mind of
blogosphere. It is so easy to detect a piece of duplicated content.
Don’t use them unless they are really that good that you need to let
You may give this report away for free.
If you currently run a blog full of duplicated
content, consider dumping it if it is not making you money. If it is
making you money, it won’t be long. You have to insert unique
content into the blog to save it from being swept.
2) Merely A Diary
If your blog is merely a diary without a theme, it can be hard to make
money from Adsense. You can make much more if your blog is closely
focused upon a theme. If you are planning to start a blog in 2007 for
the purpose of cashing with Adsense, forget about a diary. The ads
appearing on a diary cannot be well targeted. People will not click if
there is no relevancy of the ads to the content. People are hungry for
information, especially information that solves their problem,
provides convenience or provides entertainment. Think of a creative
theme and rock on it, just not a simple diary.
3) High Paying Adsense Keywords
The hype is still around. People are spending thousands of dollars
acquiring high paying adsense keywords. They are near to nonexistent.
Google has smart pricing that rules in the favor of the
advertisers. Google has never disclosed how many percent of revenue
it is going to share with you. If you found a keyword that advertisers
are paying $25 per click, it is unlikely that you will earn $12 a click on
that keyword. In fact, it is suggested that you steer away from the
keywords appearing in any suggested high paying keyword list when
you are first starting out. They do not pay what you think they will
pay, but the competition is stiff. You might not even get a click at all,
so why bother spending a whole 120 pages blog on the keyword?
You may give this report away for free.
4) Blind link exchange
Till these days, I still receive emails requesting a “blind” link
exchange. I am always happy to get a request about link exchange, but
when I look at the proposed link, it has nothing to do with my theme!
I am writing about gardening and someone send an email asking for
link exchange with his blog about Car’s Performance! Blind link
exchange will not work. In fact, it is rumored that blind link exchange
will not make but break your blog. You cannot control who is linking
to you, but you have absolute choice on who you want to link to. If
you link to spam blogs, called splogs, Google might think you have
problem distinguishing what’s good and what’s not and penalize on
you for that. Be careful on the link you are sending out.
