Revisiting AdSense

I've been gone from my blogs for awhile, and have decided to renew my interest in them. Why? Because although I haven't been posting I've been earning some decent money from AdSense with the old posts I've got out there. One of the first things I did, and I suggest you do as well, is check my templates to make sure their optimized for search engines. Mostly, what I mean by this is that my keywords have no spaces after the commas and to use root words instead of their protracted versions, such as 'blog' in lieu of 'blogs.' Imagine my surprise to realize that the majority of my blogs didn't even have description and keyword meta tags! Which obviously leads to a great post about why you should have them.

Basically what I did was go into the html template and insert just after the /title tag
< content="MY BLOGS DESCRIPTION" name="description">
< content="YOUR,BLOGS,KEYWORDS" name="keywords">
Obviously, you'll want to replace the capitalized text with your relevant description and keywords. For the description, I just copy and paste the original text description I've already written for the blogs header. From this description I extract the relevant keywords that apply to this blog, again, using the root words, separated by commas with no spaces. To get a better idea about what I'm talking about go into your browsers tool bar and select 'view source' under the 'view' tab.

The most important aspect of your blog is the title. Make sure it contains your most important keyword that people will be using in their search. For this blog it would be 'AdSense' with a secondary key phrase of 'Getting Started.' The second most important aspect of your blog is fresh content. I don't mean posting every day, though consistently updated blogs are supposed to score higher than abandoned blogs, but that the content is all original and hand written. Trust me, you're way better off hand writing one blog than using scraped or borrowed content on a hundred blogs. Google is smart and they check content against everything else out there. If it's used elsewhere then it ain't nothing new, so why should they point to it again and again? Behind the content, are the keywords, followed by the description. The description is used as a default to define your blog, site, or page. Thus, they help, but not as much as a lot of people think. But in this game, it's all about numbers and if you can get that placement 1 or 2 slots above your competition on a search for your keyword on google, then you'll see a vastly improved number of hits than otherwise.

Up until now, the blogs I've written have been mostly about the content selling the AdSense, with some secondary advertising for other affiliate programs like Amazon. I've decided to branch out and use other affiliate programs as the basis for my writing with AdSense being secondary to the content. The hard part about this is avoiding the temptation of using all that content the affiliates have already written. You can still use it as a basis, but you'll want to rewrite every single sentence! I've found it's easier to read through what they've written to get an idea of what the product offers or features, then closing that page and writing my own.

OK that's enough for now, I've got work to do to update these blogs, and I hope you'll see much more from me from here on out.

Dynamic Fresh Content on Your AdSense Sites

OK, so we've discussed how original quality content is what's going to get people to hopefully find your page and keep coming back. But, what if your page is like this one. I don't want to re-hash what everyone else says (remember that advice I read about social bookmarking and what happened?) and any changes I make will take time until I see results to share with ya'll.

So how do I provide relevant material for those who come back to my site before I've got something new to share? Simple! I've included RSS feeds from relevant sites high up on my page, so visitors will see the new links when they change. In this case the links are on the right-hand side and since this site is about my progress using AdSense, the feed is from the AdSense Blog I mentioned in my last post. Now, if I've got no new progress to report for awhile, his posts will provide changing (dynamic) links on my site and visitors (hopefully) won't think this an abandoned site.

Now I know what you're thinking: "More links out mean more lost visitors." This is something I've gone round and round about, but I think it boils down to your original content. If you've put the time into offering fresh quality content with no tricks to bait people in (How many times have you been looking for say, a theater listing, clicked a link and found yourself on a porn-site? Did you stick around or did you simply close the window and make a mental note to avoid that URL in the future?) then people will find your site. And if they find the content useful, they may bookmark it and hopefully return in the future. If they have a similar or related site, they may even post a link or your own RSS feed. Then you'll see a higher pagerank and higher listings in search results which in turn will give you more visitors. And more visitors will translate into more exposure to your AdSense Ads which will translate into more AdSense clicks! TA-DAAA!