Tweet

Google AdSense and Optimizing the Context of your Copy

Written by: Michael Marshall

Article Overview: The ability to have a sort of Google AdWords on your own site through its AdSense program and collect revenue from clickthroughs seems to me to be an exciting opportunity. Google seems to put quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that they consider context and not just keyword matching to determine which pages get matched with which AdSense sponsors - the better the content of the web page, the better quality sponsors that will be assigned to that web page. Apparently, the higher quality sponsors have higher payout amounts for clickthroughs as well.

Google AdSense and Optimizing the Context of your Copy

The ability to have a sort of Google AdWords on your own site through its AdSense program and collect revenue from clickthroughs seems to me to be an exciting opportunity. Google seems to put quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that they consider context and not just keyword matching to determine which pages get matched with which AdSense sponsors - the better the content of the web page, the better quality sponsors that will be assigned to that web page. Apparently, the higher quality sponsors have higher payout amounts for clickthroughs as well.

For the first time, to my knowledge, two revolutionary things are occurring here. The first is that good search engine optimization skills can translate DIRECTLY into revenue. (And the better the context that supports your key phrases, the more revenue earning potential you have.)

The second is that there is now a free method of getting a page crawled by Google immediately. By submitting a page to Google for approval in the AdSense program, it’ll get crawled in short order and at no extra cost to you. That's like Yahoo! saying they're not going to charge $299 anymore for inclusion and even pay you for submitting pages to them if they really like them.

Google adds sense to the Internet marketing industry
This program by Google is also encouraging people to create better content for the Internet. Website owners now have a direct financial interest and incentive to create better content. Anyone who understands contextual advertising and knows how to optimize their context has a serious competitive edge over others joining Google's AdSense program. If you can create information rich content with the right keywords and context, you can maximize the revenue you make in Google's AdSense program. That really puts the rich in "rich content" doesn’t it?

Contextual advertising is not new. It's been around for a long time. Google's major contribution in the contextual advertising space, as I see, is two-fold. The first is the delivery mechanism. Rather than pop-up ads which are intrusive and/or blocked by various browser plug-ins and add-ons users have installed, and rather than software which has to be downloaded and installed and may change the behavior of the user's computer, AdSense's ads become part of the content of the page and require no special or additional software. It is contextual advertising that avoids being intrusive and requires no extra effort on the part of the user.

The second contribution is intentional partnership for mutual benefit. Some contextual advertising programs and techniques are despised by many publishers because some third party is making money off of their content and they have no control over it and receive no revenue from it. With Google AdSense, a publisher voluntarily enters a partnership with Google wherein: (1) the placement of the ads is under the total control of the publisher, (2) even the content of the ads are under the direct influence of the publisher by means of the make up of the page’s content, and (3) the publisher shares in the revenue from the ads.

From the perspective of an advertiser and content provider, these features do indeed make a lot more sense than the alternative methods of contextual advertising.

Maximizing revenue in contextual advertising requires optimizing your context
Optimizing your context can be thought of in terms of a two-step process. I will just discuss internal page factors here, but your link strategy can be contextually optimized as well.

The first step is choosing the right keywords just as you would in any normal SEO campaign. The best place to start is at Wordtracker, which should be no surprise. Learn what are some of the more popular keywords and keyphrases when creating content from scratch to discover what subject areas may match the sponsors with the highest clickthrough payouts. You may also want to look into which words and phrases have the highest bids at pay-per-bid services to increase your chances of having ads matched to your content that have higher paying clickthrough rates.

The second step is supporting your keywords with the right secondary words. I'm not talking about simply keyword density (the number of additional words); I'm talking about semantic relevance (which additional words). In its overview page about the AdSense program, Google says, "We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages." You've got to include words in your content that are closely related to your keyphrases. You can perform this research manually in the following manner. Here are the terms in which you need to think when selecting words related to your keywords and keyphrases. (Excuse me while I wax linguistically for a moment.)

Linguistic relations: synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and holonyms.
Hypernyms – word(s) that are more generic than your keyword or keyphrases but topically related
Hyponyms – word(s) that are more specific than your keyword or keyphrases but topically related
Meronyms – word(s) that name a part of what your keyword or keyphrases signify (e.g. "brim" and "crown" are meronyms of "hat")
Holonyms – word(s) that name the whole of which your keyword or keyphrases are a part (e.g. "hat" is a holonym for "crown” and “brim")

Engine-specific Taxonomy relations: Taxonomies are a way to organize documents or web pages into logical groupings, based on their contents. Ideally, documents discussing the same subject will be grouped together into one of the taxonomy's categories.

For your target search engine (Google in our case), you need to find other web pages in your category – just do a search on your keyphrases and take note of what words and phrases are being used on those pages that clarify and expound upon the keyword(s) you've selected. You are learning what the search engine knows about the subject matter represented by the group of pages returned for your query. The deeper you go into the results pages (at least 30 links at a bare minimum), the more accurate you will be.

Once you know what the search engine knows, you'll need to know which of these words and phrases are more important than others so that you can know how to use them in your content. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this by hand with any accuracy. If you're not averse to using your own educated guess as to their relative importance, this is your only alternative to making use of some pretty complicated mathematical equations. Create sentences and phrases in your content that use words and phrases from your support list.

Related Articles
  The Best Ways To Start With AdSense!
  Google Adsense and How It Works
  What Do You Want To Know About Google AdSense?
  How Google Indexes Your Site
  Your Online Income Website Will Earn More Revenue With Google Adsense

Article Tags: AdSense, contextual advertising, Google, Google AdSense, quality sponsors, Yahoo



Related Forum Posts
Re: From $0.30 to $300 / Day on Google AdSense Part 1 - How To M - Hi Jeff - I`ll likely get into 3rd party advertising later on in the series but what I recommend doing is putting AdSense up as your baseline to test with. Get a sense over a couple of months as to how much you can make from that ad space. Remember that Google takes a percentage of all the money you make through AdSense so it would make sense to charge a higher amount for private ad sales than you`re making through AdSense - the advertisers are paying those rates anyway. Once you know how much your ad space is worth in AdSense, offer up the space to private advertisers with a 30-100% price increase. If you don`t get any takers then you can stick with AdSense... if you do sell the spots then you`re making more than you were with AdSense so it`s worth it. I didn`t have any luck with 3rd party companies who offer to handle the sales for me. Many of them contacted me but when I told them what I made through AdSense and through my own private sales, they said they couldn`t match it. The offer sounds appealing and I was really hoping that a company could take that off my hands but it looks like I`m too well optimized at this point.
AdSense solution - Hi Martin - is it a Public Service Announcement? Every now and then Google throws in PSAs if they can't find an ad to fit your site. You can either choose the default and show Google's PSAs or show your own alternate ad. This is the only image ad I have ever seen when I have had images turned off. Google updates it's data very regularly. I have a plugin on my computer that shows me my AdSense earnings. It logs in to update every 15 minutes and there are always changes. Note that the AdSense time zone is Pacific (California) so you might have to wait some time before you notice a change in days.
Re: How can a social networking site make serious money? - [quote="TannyL":2d06c9rb]Hi Kevin, They sell ad space, use Google AdSense, and some of them like StumbleUpon have an upgrade option, why I don't know, but people upgrade.[/quote:2d06c9rb] Hi Tanny, I'm not very convinced that Google AdSense will generate any serious amounts of revenue for a social networking site. Simply ask yourself when was the last time you were on Facebook, another major networking site or even this forum and whether or not you clicked through an ad? The answer was probably no.
Re: Money never sleeps - Well I guess it goes back to the old cliché of "don't work for money, but learn to have money working for you." However, aside from using your money to invest in things like property, stocks, etc... what are some of the other ways? I feel that the average Google AdSense user can't even make enough each month to buy a new pair of shoes. So in that respect, I wouldn't count on AdSense to help you earn more money while you sleep.
Online sales programs - Can anybody recommend a few good options for making money online besides Google AdSense?


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

10 Golden rules to survive the Global Crisis

10 Steps to a Great Support Team

Too Many Sales Reps Are Wimps

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.