Saturday, October 4, 2008

How to apply Top Paying Keywords?

The First of all, we must understand that Google Adsense bot (formally known as Google Mediabot) is a subset of Google's main crawler. The crawler detects the theme of the pages and makes an entry in the Google's index (a private index - not shown publicly) that records the theme of all the pages hosting Adsense script. In other words, Google Mediabot has the characteristics somewhat similar to Google's main crawler.

Applying top paying keywords in your website is quite similar to Search Engine Optimization. However, there are many differences as well. I have done in-depth research on the subject. On the basis of that research, I have marked the points you need to keep in mind while optimizing your website for maximum payouts through highest paying Adsense keywords. We will discuss how to apply top paying keywords as well as traffic pulling keywords to a webpage for maximum payouts and traffic.

There are two types of optimizations that you need to follow to make a web page search engine optimized. Same is the case with Adsense Optimization.

Internal Optimization : Internal Optimization includes Meta tags, Title Text, Optimization of content, and internal linking of your website. Here we will learn how to increase relevancy of ads and how to inject keywords that will help you get high paying ads. Internal Optimization has a high impact on the relevancy of ads and CTR.

External Optimization : This includes the web pages that are giving links to you (external profile of your website), anchor text being used to link your website, and many more variables that search engines use to evaluate the authoritative importance of a web page. External Optimization helps bring relevant traffic to your website and enables you to earn more by getting more CTR (Click Thru Ratio).

How long does your webpage take to show high paying ads?

The relevancy of ads increases as Google's main crawler visits your website and updates its index. Furthermore, you may observe an increase in the earnings as the PR of your website/web page increases. This means that in case of Google Adsense, the internal factors that affect the ads of a particular page are evaluated by Google Mediabot (but Google's main crawler can overwrite them). And on the other hand, the external factors are inspected by the Google Crawler over a period of time. Having said that, there are simply many many factors (including those which you cannot control) that affect your ads.

This is an important question that needs to be answered. As soon as you apply Adsense script in a webpage, it is visited by the Google Mediabot (within 2 hours to 48 hours, if the bot is free - immediately). Google Mediabot's responsibility is to evaluate the theme of the web page, and enable ads almost immediately so that your website traffic does not see FREE SERVICE ADS.
We are going to discuss the factors that you can control. Lets take control!
Remember:

Relevancy of ads may increase as your page is indexed by Google.
EPC (Earnings Per lick) may increase as your PR increases.
It entirely depends upon you how well you promote your website and get maximum earnings from your website/web pages.
In case of Google, many variables are involved.

How to Getting More Clicks on Your Ads

More CTR (Click Thru Ratio) means more clicks on your Google Ads. But, is CTR all about position and colors of your ads? No! It's a lot more than that. CTR also depends upon the quality of traffic, relevancy of ads, and even the subject of your website. Let's get in detail:

Do you own a High CTR website?

Yes! CTR varies from Industry to industry too. It depends upon the keywords you are using to make your web page. It has been observed that more technical the topic is (but not necessarily) less CTR it will give you (for example Search Engine Optimization, Affiliate Network - exceptions are always there), but still works if the Ad content is well written.

However, this is only one condition; there are many undiscovered conditions that affect the CTR of keywords. At times, a particular season also has an effect on the performance of keywords. For example family of 'Turkey recipe' keyword is more active around November and December only and a quite sluggish rest of the year. It becomes really necessary to study the behavior of keywords before starting a massive website of Adsense around a topic.

Your Ad Position and Color:

Old, but very effectiveGoogle heat map helps improve the CTR (Clicks Thru Ratio) of your website by suggesting you the most converting areas for your Adsense Ads. Darker the area, better will be the performance of your ads. Your visitor tends to click on these darker areas more often than the other areas of the web page. Ads placed near rich content usually do well because users are focused on those areas of your web page. For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the concluding part of high quality content tend to perform well, as the visitors are left with no other choice except clicking the Ad block.

Traffic that is interested in your content (also called targeted traffic) is interested in your ads too. Thus, there is every likelihood that your ads will be clicked more frequently. Targeted traffic means more CTR, more earnings, and enhanced ad convertibility. On the other hand, the untargeted visitors are not interested either in your content or your ads, so keep your website's traffic targeted.

You can gather highly targeted traffic for your website by web promotion strategy and effective optimization of your web page structure. Effective web promotion strategy requires an appropriate Anchor text and more back links from relevant websites. And, to develop an effective web page structure, you have to optimize your Title Text, internal linking of your website, and most importantly your web content, in the best possible manner. Choosing the right anchor text for back links promotes your website to the traffic you exactly need from the search engines. Choose the Anchor text that directly speaks to your visitors and pulls the traffic that your web page requires.

Targeted traffic results in increased CTR of ads. It helps promote your website to that segment of traffic, which is precisely searching for your content (or you can say the traffic that is most profitable to you). Targeting irrelevant keyword reduces your CTR by gathering the traffic which is not interested in your content or ads. Title text of your webpage appears in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) as the Title link to your web page. Therefore, it is the title Text that directly speaks to the surfer on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) about your content's theme. It acts like a Free Advertisement Link to your website. If your title text does not interest the surfer, you lose considerable amount of much-needed traffic. Figure out a Title text that directly communicates with your potential visitors, brings targeted traffic, and enhances the CTR of your AdSense Ads. Don't overdo your title text, and use less than ten keywords in your title text. There are many on-page and off-page elements that affect your ad relevancy. Better targeted ads increase both your CTR and EPC. Here is how to optimize your ads:
If there is NO CONTENT on your web page, the Google Mediabot will consider the Meta Tags while displaying ads. tags have a considerable affect on the relevancy of your ads. It is advised never to leave this space empty. Also, try to make it as easy as possible for Mediabot to understand the theme of your web page. Google Mediabot gives good weightage to the keywords used in the Title text, which in turn gets reflected in your ads. Choose effective keywords for your Title text. Even the order of words in a keyword can affect the ads that are appearing on your web page. So, choose your keywords wisely.
Now, you can enhance Ad relevancy by using Google's Section targeting. Using this technique you can advise Google mediabot about the areas of your content which should be considered or ignored while matching the Ads with your content.

Use Channels for Analyzing Your Ads' Performance. Try to relate your traffic logs with your CTR stats. You will get to know which Traffic source is giving you what CTR. This will help you recognize the traffic segment which is most converting for your website. Channels allow you to analyze your ads' performance, so that you can pin point the changes that your website needs to boost your AdSense income. There are two types of channels available - URL Channels and Custom Channels. You can use the URL channel to track your performance, without modifying your Ad code. Through URL channels, you can analyze the performance of individual page or a group of pages, based on the directory system of your website.

Custom channels can help you measure the performance of different Ad formats presented in your web pages. And, by pasting channel-specific ad code into your pages, you can track CTR, Impressions, number of clicks each individual ad format is generating, and compare its performance with other web pages.
There are many junk websites that might be displaying ads on your website. These websites steal the traffic from your website and recycle it on their own Adsense ad blocks. Recognize such websites and stick them in Adsense Competitive Ad filter. Also, you can block your competitor websites using this competitive filter.

Choosing the Best Keywords for AdSense

Ever wondered how to select the best keywords for your Adsense websites? Your focus is earning money as well as attracting organic traffic towards your website. Here is what you need to know while choosing a keyword, a scientific study that maps the ideal keywords for your next upcoming adsense website.
We shall first study how to choose keywords that lead to more Adsense money.

CPC - Advantages and Drawbacks

What does CPC indicate?

When we think of high paying keywords, the first thing that pops up in our mind is CPC. CPC (Cost Per Click) is the maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. Higher the CPC of a particular keyword, more will be the payouts you can expect by targeting that keyword in your AdSense websites. You can get the most accurate CPC from the source itself - Google.
However, CPC is not the only factor that tells the profitability of a keyword. There are many other factors that you should consider.

Drawbacks of CPC

- What if there are no advertisers bidding on a keyword having high CPC? Obviously, it means no one is going to pay you that high for a click.
- What if the traffic on the keyword is technical enough and does not click on ads (banner blindness)?
- What if Google gets loads of traffic on that keyword, enough to fulfill the desires of high paying advertisers? In this case, Google will only throw remaining peanuts towards you.

Obviously, Google will like to keep all the high paying ads within its own pages. So you see, CPC just shows you a small part of the entire picture. We shall explore the rest part of the picture...

Number of Sponsors - The Most Important Figure

Keywords with high CPC do not always come with high number of advertisers. There are many keywords in Google's Adwords system that have a high price, but almost no or very less number of advertisers. Now, if you build a web page or website around a keyword on which no one is bidding, Google will try to fill the ad blocks with ads of the related keywords rather than the high paying keyword you were initially targeting. There is no guarantee that ads of the related keywords will be good converters. Therefore, there is every likelihood that your clicks will be passed through SmartPricing Filter, eventually resulting in lesser payouts.

Hence, it is important to see the number of sponsors bidding on the keyword in question. If there are more the advertisers, there will be more competition among them to get the top position. This means that there will be more revenue per click that they are willing to share with you. In other words, more sponsors mean more people fighting against one another other to pay you more Adsense money.

Number of clicks on an Ad

It refers to the number of clicks an advertiser gets when his ad appears on the top. If the number of clicks and number of advertisers is less, just ignore those keywords, no matter what their CPC is. However, if the clicks per month are lower than expected, but the number of advertisers is a good one - it's the right choice for you. Such keywords are called "Niche AdSense' keywords." Here the word 'niche' is used in commercial context. This means that Google is not able to generate traffic on such keyword ads. This makes it difficult for it to exhaust the advertising budgets of the advertisers. Therefore, in order to meet its targets, Google happily shares high paying ads with you, resulting in more payouts. Try to find such "Niche AdSense' keywords."

Coming to Higher number of clicks - It indicates:

Either the traffic segment is ignorant about the online advertising concepts, and click on these ads unknowingly. This means you will experience higher CTR on your ads when placed at appropriate place. You don't have to put in much efforts to fight banner blindness.

Or, the traffic is highly commercial and willing to purchase the advertised product over internet. This means that there are very little chances of your facing the SmartPricing phenomenon.

Number of clicks along with the other stats like Number of sponsors and CPC, can enable you to make more wise decisions while choosing keywords for your AdSense content.

Bidding Quality

It's important to see the pattern in which people are bidding on a keyword. Suppose there are 400 advertisers bidding on a keyword. The top 20 of these are paying something like $15 per click, while the rest of them pay somewhere between $2 and $0.05. Now you might have found some decent tools that give you the average of top 3 or top 5 positions which is good, but not good enough. The point is that although the top 20 advertisers are paying higher, but the rest 380 advertisers are paying quite low. There is a high probability of your getting the ads of those 380 sponsors. Therefore, the average of the top 20 advertises can be really misleading. The solution to this problem is discussed in the later part of this page.

We have enough Adsense money now. Let's build some traffic on your website.

Traffic Building for AdSense:

Choosing Niche Keywords

Niche keywords are the keywords that are highly searched by the web surfers, and are rarely used by your competitors. Less competition means more traffic to your website. Targeting ten niche keywords is easier and more fruitful that targeting a highly competitive keyword. Traffic from niche keywords when directed to a relevant page increases your CTR and conversion ratio.

Determining Competition

People generally take the number of results returned by search engines as the number of pages competing on a keyword. But it is wrong. The Search Engine Results get irrelevant after 10 - 15 pages. Irrelevancy further increases with the depth. The pages that have the keyword dumped in a corner are not competing against you, but search engines will still list them. In fact they have to.

It is assumed that if a webmaster is targeting a web page with a particular keyword, the keyword is used in the title as well as in the anchor text linking to that webpage. Such a page is listed higher by the search engines as it is dedicated to what you searched for. So how to filter out the most relevant results? Check it out!

Inanchor intitle and Its Precision - The Solution

In Google, you can easily determine the EXACT number of pages that are competing against you. You can precisely list out the pages that are using a particular keyword in their page titles or in the anchor texts linking to them.

The query can be applied as follows: intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword.

For example, if the keyword is "hair treatment", the formula will be used in the following manner: intitle:hair inanchor: hair intitle: treatment inanchor: treatment. This figure gives you the exact number of pages that are ACTUALLY Targeting with these keywords, and not those that have just created a page or a small paragraph on the same topic. Google emphasizes on Anchors and Page titles. That's the reason, it supports such a search query.
We shall now discuss some other traditional ways to determine competition.

R/S Ratio

Here, R refers the number of competitor websites for a particular keyword as per the search result of the search engine. And S refers the number of searchers using that keyword while searching their queries. This means that for better results, you have to choose the keywords with lower R/S ratio.

R/S ratio becomes polluted when someone uses the number of results as the number of competing websites. As explained above, counting the number of results as the number of competing pages is the biggest mistake one can make while choosing a keyword. However, the figure becomes quite useful when inanchor intitle is used to create R/S.

KEI Analysis

KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a formula for measuring the effectiveness of a keyword. The formula was devised by Sumantra Roy. However, this figure also depends upon the number of searches and competition, but with a difference. This formula analyzes the number of searches and competition in such a way that if the searches increase, KEI increases; and if the competition increases, KEI decreases. Higher the KEI, more profitable will be the keyword. However, it becomes polluted when the number of search results are used as the number of competitors.

Determining Traffic

Determining traffic for a keyword is quite important before targeting it. Along with the competition stats, it lets you make out the niches present in any industry. Besides, it lets you predict (to some extent) how much traffic you can expect if you promote a website around a particular keyword. There are two known sources for determining traffic. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now a part of Yahoo Search Engine) and WordTracker. When talking about accuracy, Wordtracker monitors the queries on some meta search engines that actually render it inaccurate . Reason? There is no known stat about how much of the community you are targeting is searching on those meta search engines. However, it's a good tool to make out the niches.

In my opinion, Yahoo owned Overture gives you more accurate stats than Wordtracker. This is for the reason that Overture is a PPC engine. It can show you how many people are searching for a particular term on its vast network. A network which is bigger than any Meta Search Engine. Still, it is not that accurate, but at least better than Wordtracker. The tools that are predicting Google Searches for you are just doing guess work. No one knows the algorithm they use.

Summing It Up

Profitability of a keyword depends more on the number of sponsors than CPC. Number of clicks and bidding quality can't be determined by just monitoring the first 3 or 8 places. It can be rightly assessed by taking out the average of all the 400 sponsors bidding on a keyword. Sounds very tiring for keyword research, right? Well, Keyword Country (http://www.keywordcountry.com) gives you not only the average of all the sponsors bidding on a keyword, but also the Max CPC from Google, Clicks per month from Google, No. of Advertisers present in Google Adwords system for a keyword, Competitors through inanchor intitle, R/S ratio and KEI with inanchor intitle, Traffic through Overture, and much more. All this enables you to make a wise decision while choosing the keywords.

How to Build Traffic on Your Website?

Post Articles

It is important that you publish and post more and more articles on the net or article websites. This gives you an advantage as it gets incoming links to your website. Posting unique articles catering to the interest of a large number of readers is also an effective way of driving organic traffic to your website. Well written articles bring more traffic to your website. More traffic means more profit for you. It is observed that as the PR of your website increases, the AdSense payouts also increase.

You can hope to get many more internal links to your website through this medium. Search engines take into account the number of quality back links while assigning rank to your website. If visitors reading your articles are interested, they will check out your website and you will have increased number of links. In comparison to the links that point to other websites from your website, the links that point to your website give more points to your rankings.

Linking Your website

There are two types of links - Internal Links and External Links. Internal Links refer to the internal linking of web pages whereas External Links define the websites that are linking to your website.

Getting links from other websites is the most powerful tool to drive traffic to your website. The results are instantaneous and highly effective. Getting links from quality websites with higher PR and proper anchor text results in more organic traffic from search engines. Half the battle is won if you are able to provide the links in abundance.

There are many tools available for automatically building links to your website. There are some link exchange directories on the net which are a good support in link building campaigns. However, the use of these support systems depend entirely on your beliefs and strategies. Proper inter-linking of your web pages is also relevant and significant in driving traffic.

Optimize Your Website

Search engines will look at both the internal and external profile of your website while assigning a rank to a web page. Internal profile of a website (also known as On Page Optimization) includes usage of meta tags, heading tags, keywords, targeted content, and internal linking of website. External profile of your website defines the websites that are linking to your website. It also defines the pages where your link is placed. Besides, it identifies the PR of those pages along with the placement of your link. And it also includes the number of inward links you are getting..

Using the relevant keywords in anchor text gives a boost to rankings on the search engine result pages (SERPs).

Anchor Text

Anchor Text refers to the clickable text of a hyperlink. Anchor Text plays an important role with regard to the target traffic as well as the search engine rankings. An appropriate Anchor Text apprises the visitors of the content of the page it links to.

Besides, Anchor Text gives a real clue to the search engines regarding the content of the web page it links to. The right Anchor Text improves your website’s search engine ranking. That’s why it’s imperative to pick the Anchor Text astutely.

Google reckons Anchor Text to be an indicator of the page relevance. Google, using its special operator “allinanchor:keyword”, separately indexes the Anchor Text.
Given below are some tips for choosing the right Anchor Text that suits the search engine algorithms, and attracts the right traffic.

Tools

Website tools makes your website user friendly. It is recommended that you make use of the tools that are visitor friendly. New scripts and innovative schemes for the visitor help you get more inward links. This in turn builds traffic to your website. You should add the tools that are attractive. For example, you can offer free e-books, or introduce new exciting sections relevant to your website. This will make your website exciting for the visitors. Google loves unique content. It richly rewards the websites that provide more content and better facilities to the visitors.

Google likes genuine of traffic coming to your website from Ad Sense network. Genuine traffic yields higher payouts. Website tools makes your website a genuine one. The credibility of your website increases the probability of your website getting high paying ads via Google.

Target Niche Keywords

It is important for you to identify the niche markets. This will enable you to fetch the traffic that has not been targeted much, and at the same time gels well with your industry. If your competitor is leading with X traffic on one keyword, you can compete with him by targeting ten niche keywords. This will give you the same amount of traffic.

Keyword country provides you with hordes of niche keywords. These niche keywords bring more target traffic to your web pages. This results in a better ROI (if you are selling products or affiliates) or an increased Adsense CTR (Click Thru Ratio) of your ads.