Archive for April, 2007

How to Install the Google Adsense Preview Tool for Internet Explorer

What is the Google Adsense Preview Tool?

The Google AdSense preview tool allows you to preview the ads that may show up on your webpage. This is a very useful tool for website admins who are displaying Google Adsense ads on their website. You can even click on the ads being shown here as the ads are in a test state, so you don’t have to worry about Google penalizing you by banning your Adsense account. You can preview ad formats and colors where you can select a new border or background or text colors. You can also view ads which visitors to your site say from Australia or U.K or India or China or from any other country might be seeing when they visit your website.

How do I install the Google Adsense Preview Tool?

To use the Google Adsense Preview tool, you need to install the Google Toolbar.  Google bundles the most secure browser on the planet, Firefox with the Google toolbar. . So it is nice plus plus. Get a secure browser as well as the Google Toolbar. You need to abide by the Toolbar terms that you agree to use the Adsense Preview Tool to manage your Adsense account and only use it as part of a good faith evaluation etc.

Once you click on install Google Toolbar, you might be seeing a window on the top in your browser asking for confirmation if you wish to run this software. Say yes.

Run the Google Toolbar

I already use Firefox. Should I download the Firefox with Toolbar again?

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How does Google deliver targeted ads to my blog or website?

Google Adsense continues to be the most popular way for website admins to generate revenue for their websites. Adsense is very easy to implement.

When you sign up for Adsense , Google provides you with AdSense HTML ad code which you place on the webpages on which you want to display the Google Ads. You do not have to worry about what kind of ads will be displayed as Google using its proprietary technology delivers relevant and targeted ads based on the content of that page.

The kind of ads that get displayed on your website depends on a number of factors. The most important of these are word frequency and font size. What this means is that, say you have a sports blog and you are talking about the latest schedule for the 2007 NFL season, you are most likely to have the keyword “NFL” mentioned a lot besides having the “2007 NFL regular season schedule” in bold and maybe in <h1> or <h2> tags. Google then knows that this page is about NFL and generates ads which might allow your visitors to say buy jerseys of their favorite team or other NFL merchandise. Besides these two, Google depends on keyword analysis and its algorithms to determine the content of your page to provide your visitors the most relevant ads.

Besides, targeted ads, say a particular advertiser likes your site, Google allows advertisers to select specific websites in the AdSense network on which they can run their ads. These ads do not use keyword targeting.

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Google AdSense Referral Beta

Google AdSense is rolling out a major feature to their AdSense referral program promoting more products besides their own. This is being referred to Google AdSense Referral Beta and Google is opening up beta sign-up’s for this referral program.

Sign-up for Google AdSense Referrals Beta here

For a lot of blogs and websites, Referrals constitute a bigger source of advertising income, more than contextual ads. Now, with the new AdSense Referrals Beta program, you can select products and services from Google’s base of AdWords advertisers and refer products that match your site’s content better. You can also customize these referral units to match the look and feel of your website or blog, which not only would fit seamlessly with your site’s design and content but also give you higher click rates making you more $$$.

Previously, AdSense referrals program consisted just of Google AdSense(Ad revenue for web publishers), Google AdWords (Targeted online advertising), Google Checkout (A faster, safer way to shop online) , Google Apps (Communication and collaboration tools for businesses and organizations including Gmail and more), Firefox plus Google Toolbar (Improved web browsing) and Google Pack (Collection of essential software).

As with the current units as mentioned above which you might be referring, you will generate earnings when your visitors click through an advertiser’s website and complete an action as defined by the advertisers which usually means your visitor has to complete a sale or maybe a sign-up. The good news is that since these actions involve more than a simple click or impression, advertisers pay more for these referrals, which also translates into higher earnings for you.

So, how do you find the best products to refer. According to the AdSense Blog, Google can help you find and display the most relevant and best performing referral ads on your site. All you have to do is provide a few keywords to describe your site and your users’ interests and you will see ads automatically displayed that perform best for your site. You need not worry about having to constantly update or rotate these referral units. This whole process can be completed in three simple steps as shown below.

Google Adsense referral beta steps

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Optimal URL Permalink Structure for Wordpress Blogs

In case you didn’t know, Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog posts. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article(or section) , or how you may send a link to your story in an email message or post it on a social bookmarking site. Especially when they are used to link to individual posts, once a story is posted, the URL to it should be permanent, and never change. Hence … permalink 

If you are a new beginner using WordPress, having an optimal URL structure for your blog is very important firstly because search engines love it and bring in more people to your blog. Also, once your links are linked back by the various websites out there or indexed by the search engines, it can become very difficult to change your permalink structure as they will then lead to broken 404 links.

An optimal URL structure will not have numbers or strange characters in its permalink. A permalink or the URL of the post should help the visitor decide the contents of the post better.

Here is an example of a poor URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/2007/04/19/archives/p=?420

Instead, here is an example of an efficient URL structure for a wordpress blog:

http://www.example.com/category/post-title

Having such an optimal URL structure makes your blog a lot more user friendly than the default options in wordpress as shown below. More importantly, you will increase your search engine rankings as a lot of search engines give a high weight for keywords present in the URL structure.

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How to Optimize your Blog or Website for Google Adsense

Running Google AdSense for your website is often the quickest and easiest way to start generating revenue and $$$ for your website. In this article, I will tell you how to optimize ads on your blog or website for Google Adsense. The challenges we face while implementing ads on Blogs are very unique. With Blogs such as this one, we often have a predetermined page format which makes implementation even more challenging.

We receive a lot of queries everyday on advertising on our blog and also from new publishers hoping to learn from our experiences on why we display ads the way we do. These methods have been tried and tested and are the results of many hundreds of thousands of pageviews and unique visitor clicks to ads.

Below we will share with you five tips on how to optimize the layout of ads on your blog and get you going on your way to make money using targetted ads for your visitors.

#1. Choose a bold color for the Title of your Blog

When you choose a bold color for the Title of your blog or for that matter any title or sub-heading, you are drawing the attention of your visitor there. The reason I tell you to make the title of your blog bold is that you can add link unit ads just below the title of your blog. Link units are one of the most targetted ads and you will draw your visitors attention right there when they load your website.

#2. Blend Ads into your Blog

Make sure that your ad units have the same background color, URL color, borders of your ads etc as the background of the area where the ad unit will be placed, to ensure that you blend your ad units into the background of your blog. This will greatly increase the likelihood that your readers will see and click on your ads.

#3. Use wider ad formats for ad units

In general, having a wider ad format tends to me more reader friendly where the ad units are more likely not cramped for space.  Google restricts the number of ads on each page to three exclusing link ads and referral ads. So, the best three ads for an article page would be

a. Have a horizontal 468 x 60 banner just above your content in your post. Another good ad unit is the 250 x 250 square embedded on the top left side of your post.

b. If you have a blog that allows comments to be posted, have a 300 x 250 medium rectange above the comments section and at the end of the article.

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