Adsense can be like the Golden Child we all dream of having. It will mind our every wish and will try hard to meet our every expectation.
On the other hand, it can be like the red-headed rebel step child all of us fear. It won’t behave at all, sending us such un-relevant, low paying ads that we wonder if it’s not some bad joke someone is playing on us.
Before you undertake any Adsense tweaking in your Blog, make sure you know how to add your Adsense Publisher ID to your Adsense Ready Wordpress Theme if you’re using one.
Well, I’m not Nanny 911, but I’ve had a few of those unruly Adsense children. Heare are a few tips to make that misbehaving Adsense child of yours behave. Follow along.
1. Make Your Site ‘Adsense Friendly’ - Your site design can play a big part in the way your Adsense ads behave. Just as with any small child, keep things that you don’t want Adsense to play with out of reach. Don’t go putting images that have nothing to do with our content near Adsense ads. The same goes with unrelated text. You don’t want Adsense reading garbage. Only related content, images and other files should be near your Adsense baby.
2. Make a Section for Adsense To Play In – Try and restrict where Adsense plays. You wouldn’t want you baby wandering all over the house and you don’t want Adsense wandering all over your site. Use ‘Target Sectioning’ to control Adsense if it’s throwing some goofball ads back.
Section targeting consist of using some HTML tags to “section off” areas of content you want your Adsense to read and pull relevant ads from. Google says they can’t guarantee that the Adsense ads show will be relevant if you use ’section targeting’, but if Adsense is not showing relevant ads already, you have little to lose by using ’section targeting’.
You use section targeting by picking some content and using the HTML tags to “suggest” to your Adsense ads to pick the relevant information for the contextual ads from this ’section of content’ you’ve chosen. Make sure it’s a section with lots of content. Don’t try to ‘target section’ just a paragraph or two.
Use the following code to ‘target section’.
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
Obviously, the <!– google_ad_section_start –> goes at the start of the section you want to target and the <!– google_ad_section_end –> goes at the end.
The code for your Adsense page might look something like this:
<html><head><title>Section Targeting My Content to get Adsense’s Attention</title></head>
<body>
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is a section of content in my new spiffy blog. This is a section of content that I want Google Adsense to pull contextual ads from. Blah, blah, blah, blah.
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
</body>
</html>
You can also tell Google Adsense what areas YOU DO NOT want to be read by Adsense by using(weight=ignore) in the starting tag, like this;
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
Google says it may take 1 to 2 weeks for ads from the sectioned areas to show up, so be patient. Remember, the don’t guarantee nothing!
3. Other tricks to reign in an unruly Adsense chid – Use title tags in all your links.
* Add title tags to your links – The title tags go into your link structure like this <a href=”http://www.myspiffynewblog.com” mce_href=”http://www.myspiffynewblog.com” title=”this is the title area”>My Spiffy New Blog</a>
* Add title tags to your images – Be sure to add a relevant title to your images like this <img src=”piconmyspiffyblog.jpg” title=”relevant info goes here”>. Adsense sometimes uses this title to decide what ads to show. Adding a relevant title to your images will also help SEO your page.
I have a 7 year old Real Estate site as the website for my B&M business. On some of the pages I could never get Adsense to show ads that were relevant to the content on the pages until I changed my title tags on links.
On a few rare occassions, Adsense actually followed and read the title of the page where the link was pointed!
Here are more Adsense tips:
* Use descriptive <Heading> tags - You should also carefully consider what is inside your <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags. Adsense will sometimes pull info from there as well.
* Use relevant names for your images - Another area I’ve seen Adsense use to pull information from is the names of images. I always try to make sure that my images have names that reflect the content on the page. If I have a web page on Big Blue Widgets, then any image I might have will probably have names with ‘blue’, ‘big’ and ‘widgets’ in them.
* Use descriptive Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions – I’ve also seen Adsense pull information from your <meta keywords> and <meta description>, so make sure both of those tags, (generally located in a header.php file if you’re running a blog, or at the top of an HTML page), reflect information about the content page and information you want Adsense to pull ads from.
* Use Bold and Italics for relevant keywords – If you’re still not getting the results you want, try Bolding and Italicizing keywords inside the ’section targeted’ area.
There’s only so much we can do with Adsense if it doesn’t want to behave. There are coding tricks to use that will force Adsense to display very specific ads, but messing with the Adsense code is against the TOS and can get your account banned so I’ll not even post those here.
The above tricks and tactics have made my Adsense Ads show relevant ads about 98% of the time. That’s about as close as I can hope with any contextual advertising, so I’ll take it.
Remember, you don’t have to put up with Adsense ads that misbehave. These tricks above should get them walking the line. Just give it a week or two and you should be fine!
