How to Get Your Adsense Ads to Match Your Article Content: The Power of Optimization

Is your website or article about breeding puppies, while your Adsense ads are about losing belly fat? Here's how to optimize your content for both search engines and readers, and get the best match to content-relevant ads to maximize your advertising income.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. ***Learn About Adsense***
   
   Adsense ads are a huge money-maker, not only for Google, but for millions of website owners and bloggers, not to mention a few thousand authors here at eHow. Adsense ads are context-relevant. That is, they are supposed to reflect the content of your article. An eHow article about buying refrigerators should carry ads for (go ahead, guess!)...refrigerators.
   
   But it doesn't always seem to work right. An article about playing with your baby might show ads for learning a new language. Say what!
   
   Read on, for some tips on optimizing your content and getting a better match.

2. ***Practice Patience***
   
   A key thing to be aware of, it that it sometimes takes Google a day or so to 'spider' your content, and find the right matching ads. If you have just posted content minutes ago, and the ads don't seem to match, go find something else to do. Come back in a few hours and check again, or even wait until the next day. Most of the time, time itself will correct things.
   
   But if not, there are steps you can take, starting with...

3. ***Pay Attention to Titles***
   
   The Adsense spider (the little web robot, or 'bot', that reads your content) pays a lot of attention to titles.
   
   The title of your article should contain the key terms the article is about. If you're writing about playing baseball, a title like "How to Play Baseball" is going to keep you on target with Adsense far more successfully that something like "How to Understand America's Favorite Pastime".
   
   Give your titles careful thought, in order to focus your Adsense optimization efforts.

4. ***Choose Keywords: Part I***
   
   Keywords are the main terms that capture the essence of your article. Use the keywords throughout your article, without overdoing it, and use synonyms as well.
   
   An article on How to Hire a Lawyer should not only use the word "lawyer" several times, but should also include terms like attorney, law firm, legal to emphasize the subject matter.

5. ***Choose Keywords: Part II***
   
   Make it easy for Adsense to recognize what you're about. Don't wander off into other territory. If your article about lawyers starts to tell a big story about a car accident, complete with makes and models of the cars involved, don't be surprised to find that Adsense places car ads instead of lawyer ads.
   
   (Note that by including Steps #4 and #5, I'm violating my own rules for the optimization of this article. I've introduced new topics -- lawyers and car crashes -- likely to confuse the Google bot, and make Adsense optimization more difficult. Take a look at the ads, to see what I mean).

6. ***Keywords: Part III***
   
   At eHow, and many other sites, you have an opportunity to enter keywords in a special area or text box, outside the actual content of your article. The words or phrases you enter should be on topic, and should be identical (or very similar) to terms used in the article, in order to help optimize the article for content-relevant advertising. These terms will emphasize to the Adsense spider what your article is about (notice how I'm repeating the term 'Adsense', but not beating it to death, and also throwing in a Google here and there).
   
   I don't recommend trying to 'expand' your keywords in the keyword box. That is, if you're writing about lawyers, don't enter 'Harvard' in the keyword box, unless this is something actually mentioned in the article.

7. ***Patience Redux***
   
   If you've crafted your titles, articles and keywords carefully, and have waited a day, and you still don't have a good match, then some tinkering is in order. Google Adsense is clever, but not perfect.
   
   Don't spend weeks on this...your time is probably better spent writing another article. But do try to make some changes to bring things into better focus.
   
   Try a different title as your first step. Your original title might seem fine, but some quirky thing is getting in the way. Change it by adding a strongly related keyword, removing extraneous terms, or just juggling things around willy-nilly, and see if it works (again, you might need to give it a day).
   
   If your content is overly sparse, that can also lead to misplaced ads, so if needs be, fatten things up a bit (ooops....fatten is one of those words that might get me diet ads. ooops again....diet is another trouble word).

Tips & Warnings

• You might see appropriate ads when you preview your eHow article, but not when you actually publish it. It's weird, but that's how it goes sometimes. Just be patient, and they should correct themselves in a while.
• Not all topics have a lot of available Adsense ads, in which case, all bets are off, and you can wind up with anything.

Resources

• Google: How Adsense Ads are Targeted
• Need more help? Ask a professional research service.
• Learn how to earn $1,000 a month (or more) at eHow

[askwritefish]

on 12/18/2009 Useful advice about adsense and also about using adsense; your advice adds clarity of all the adsense advice about making sense with adsense. I suppose you can also overdo it with adsense also.

[ecrazy]

on 11/16/2009 thanks for the useful info

[jadedragoninbc]

on 11/3/2009 Your key words are working since you have two ads for "24/7 SEO for Law Firms"

[maureenw59]

on 10/28/2009 Your articles are so helpful and honest and well written. Thanks. 5* I have subscribed, and recommended you.

[frugalmomi]

on 10/14/2009 This helped me so much Thank you !