your AdSense income is affected by many different factors, including how much
advertisers are willing to pay for ads and how much Google
decides to take for its trouble. As for factors that you, as an AdSense user, can actually affect, site design, of all things, is probably the most important because the design of your site affects the way that search engines rank the site in search results. The higher your site ranks, the more traffic that hits your Web site, which means (potentially) more AdSense income.
optimization is your first step. Ensure that your site is optimized for search engines, and the traffic on your Web site will increase dramatically as your search engine rankings rise.
People search for stuff all the
time — that’s just what people do. We want information, and in the 21st
century, the fastest way to find information is to go to a search engine. Now,
if you have a Web site, you want those folks looking for pertinent info to be
directed straight to your
Web site rather than that other guy’s Web site one domain block over. You want
your site to rank
well in search engines — in other words, search engines like Google. In fact,
ranking well in search engines is so important that Web site owners are willing
to pay thousands of dollars each year to ensure their sites rank as high as
possible. Search marketing — the
practice of creating marketing targeted at getting your Web site listed high
enough in search engine rankings that it’s noticed by people — is a $12 billion
a year industry and is one of the fastest growing marketing segments out there.
The way you optimize your Web site so that it’s easier to find online is
search engine optimization
(SEO). Go figure. It’s kinda obvious, isn’t it? Where it begins to look a little muddy is in defining what, exactly, is the best strategy to adopt when optimizing a Web site. I’m here to tell you, though, that even if the topic is a bit muddy, you can still follow a few guidelines — guidelines that make a big difference in where your site ranks in search results. The rest of this chapter lays out a few of these SEO truths in all their glory.
Optimizing Your Site for Search Engines
Search engine optimization is a lot
like trying to catch the steam that you breathe on a cold winter day. You can
see it. You know it exists, but there’s no way to actually contain and quantify
the steam. You can see the results of SEO and you can figure out how best to
achieve it, but it’s still possible to do everything right and not achieve the
ultimate goal — landing the very first listing on a search engine results page, or SERP.
Good news though, you don’t
necessarily want to be the very top listing on a SERP. Think about this — how often
do you click the first search result and not go any farther? Even if you find
exactly what you’re looking for on the first page you jump to, you still click
through some of the other results just to make sure the first page isn’t lying
to you.
As a general rule, I go through
the listings of about ten results pages, just to make sure I’m getting the best
info. Admittedly, I may be a little more patient than your average searcher.
Most people don’t go much deeper than the second page of results. Because you
should probably be targeting your Web site to normal folks rather than
obsessive-compulsive types like me, you want your Web site to fall somewhere on
the first or second page of results. If it does, you’re fine — you can count
your search marketing efforts a success, even if your site isn’t at the very
tippy-top of the first SERP.
Achieving that first- or second-page placement isn’t a sure
thing — it requires a little effort on your part. You can take a number of
steps to ensure a better search engine ranking — steps I get to in a bit — but
the most important piece in your SEO puzzle involves the keywords on which your
Web site is based. You do have keywords, right? If not, you need them. However,
not just any keyword will do, which the next section makes clear.
A Keyword By Any Other Name
It doesn’t matter what you call
it, a keyword will always be . . . well, a key word or phrase around which your
Web site content is centralized. A single word is sometimes not enough to
narrow the possibilities for a Web site, which is why some keywords are
actually keyword phrases or keyphrases. It’s the same
concept — a centralized theme — just using more than one word. I use the term
keyword generically to mean both keywords and keyphrases.
Web crawlers are programs that travel around the Internet examining and
categorizing Web pages by keyword. That’s how search engines, like Google, know
to return your Web site when someone searches for a specific keyword or phrase.
The crawler has already had a look-see and has placed your Web page into a
category
along with all the other sites on
the Web that fit into that category.
Keyword marketing, then, is using that keyword or phrase to
market your Web site. Advertisements for a Web site, product, or service are
designed using the keyword or keyphrase as the “foundation” for the ads. Then,
when Internet users search for that keyword, the ads are displayed in the
search results. Google then takes this process one step further by placing ads
on Web pages that are built around — or optimized for — that keyword. So,
whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words didn’t realize the Internet
would come along and reduce that value to just one or two — three at the most.
Understanding Keyword Marketing
Before finding out how keywords
work, you first need a quick overview of how Web sites are cataloged and then
returned as search results. The way things go, you first put up a Web site. It
doesn’t have to be anything fancy — maybe it’s your personal blog about your
busybody Aunt Louise and how crazy she makes you, or it could be a serious site
about how frogs hibernate in the muck at the bottom of ponds during winter. The
topic of your Web site doesn’t matter, but you have to get it on the Internet.
After you put up a Web site, a search crawler — a
specialized software program that examines Web sites and categorizes them by
keyword — finds your Web site. Search crawlers are designed to crawl every Web
site within parameters that are outlined by the search crawler’s designer. A
designer could order a search crawler to, say, examine Web sites contained on a
list drawn by the designer.
The crawler’s first stop is the
first Web page of the first Web site on the designer’s list. The crawler reads through the pages
of the Web site, looking at each word on the site.
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