15 Tips to increase AdSense earnings

• Find your keywords

Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. A free and advanced tool for finding the most prominent keywords in a page can be found here: SEO Density Analyzer. Copy the most important keywords to a text file ([web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt).

• Improve your keywords

Get keyword suggestions from Overture Search Inventory and from Google AdWords Sandbox. Get new keywords that can help you improve your ad relevance. Enter the keywords from [web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt and save the suggestions to [web page name]-adsense-suggestions.txt.

• Keep your website focused on a theme

Use the keyword suggestions to enhance your web pages and to build theme-based content. And also try to get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. Don’t forget that Google AdSense is keyword-targeted advertising: Google AdSense bases its advert topics on yourwebsites content, this means that content-rich websites of a popular topic should attract a large amount of ads.

• Write a new page every day

One of the best tips is to add a new page to your web site every day. The more content you have, the more visitors you will get. Put an Adsense unit on each and every content page of your site. But where? You will find more about that from the next AdSense tips.

• Choose the right AdSense format

Wider formats are successful because the ads are compact, easy to read and are complementary to the content. The top three AdSense formats are:

1. 336×280 large rectangle
2. 300×250 medium rectangle
3. 160×600 wide skyscraper

Another successful format is the 468×15 horizontal ad links, that can be placed under your navigation bar.

• Color tips

When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.

Create a custom AdSense palette:

• border color = background color of your web site
• background color = background color of your web site
• link color = blue, color of your links
• url color = black, #999999
• text color = black, #333333, color of your main content

You can also rotate your color palette: select multiple color palettes that blend with your site to create variety.

• Position tips

Visitors tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links.

Place the AdSense ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page or under your headlines, where your visitors are most likely to look at.

If you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is a good place for AdSense ads because your visitors read the text and then they want more resources.

• Increase the number of ads, but not too much

If you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple AdSense units. You can use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links.

Link units allow the user to refine what they’re interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they’ll be able to specify that they’re interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.

AdSense for Search allows visitors to search Google.com or your sites (up to 3 domains). You earn moneywhenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. If you click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox in the AdSense for Search settings, you won’t lose your visitors.

• Preview Google ads

You can find out what ads will be served by Google AdSense if you install Google AdSense Preview Tool, a very simple tool available only for Internet Explorer 6.0. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list. Because AdSense uses geo-targeting, Google serves different ads for other countries. Instead of faking your IP or travelling abroad to test your ads, use this AdSense tool to see what ads see your visitors from France, Germany or other countries.

There may be no Google AdSense ads available for your webpage, so Googlw will display Public Service Ads. You can hide them using alternate colors or images. Make sure you include the image in a simple html file as a link (use target=”_top”). The image size should be the same as the dimension of AdSense units. In the alternate url box, enter the absolute url of the html file.

Read more about alternate ads.

• What not to do

1. Don’t click on your own ads
2. Don’t ask others to click on your Google ads
3. Don’t manually change AdSense code
4. Don’t place Google ads on sites that include prohibited content (e.g.: adult sites)
5. Don’t employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links
6. Don’t use AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads (e.g.: Yahoo Publisher Network)

• Show images above or next to your ads

Placing images above AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. However, depending on the method of implementation this could be considered encouraging users to click on ads. So you should include a border line between the ads and the images. Don’t show specific products in your images, in order not to mislead the visitors. Just use generic images that will increase the visibility of your ads.

• Use section targeting

Use section targeting to emphasize some content in your page. On your site, place this code where you want to emphasize.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Content you want to emphasize.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

If you want some content to be ignored, use 

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

• Alternate the colors of your ads

AdSense allows you to have up to 4 color variations for each variable for which you can specify color. You should do that if you put AdSense ads on pages that receive many impressions from the same visitors (for example forums) to reduce ad blindness. For example:

google_color_border = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"];
google_color_link = ["000000","BBB90C","BBB90C","628098"];
google_color_url = ["000000","628098","000000","000000"];
google_color_text = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"];

• Your Google ads should be visible

Make sure your text ads are visible to the surfers in all screen formats. If you put the ads in a table, give sufficient breathing room, i.e. proper cell padding and cell spacing to make the ads stand out from the rest of your content.

• Use AdSense channels

You can categorize the content of your website into channels and then track your performance. This way you can experiment with different types of ads and see which is performing the best. Instead of buying an AdSense tracker, you can enter the most important pages in your site and see how they are doing. Create up to 500 channels for AdSense.