AdSense Case Study: Stage 2 now available

Finally found the time to finish optimizing the pages in my AdSense Case Study featuring the Invisible Fence Guide. As of today, visitors to the Guide are automatically redirected to the pages from Stage 2. The pages from Stage 1 are still available, of course, so that you can see what changes I made.

Refer back to my posting AdSense Case Study: Stage 2 Description — It's All About Keyword Optimization for the rundown on what I was doing. Nothing glamorous, trust me. Just looking carefully at the content of each page and making sure that the right keywords were mentioned enough times in the right spots. If they weren't, I either reworded things or added more content to emphasize them.

This is where it gets tricky, of course. Don't overdo your keyword usage. Remember, you're writing content that is going to be read by a human being at some point, and it has to make sense. It has to flow. If you put in too many keywords, chances are the text won't read well. Don't go bolding or italicizing words for no good reason.

At this stage I also did some housekeeping chores, like making sure that there were description and keyword tags for each file. And creating an “about” page describing what the site's about. (A “sitemap” page will come later.) Checking the links to make sure they're all working. Thinking about whether anything was missing from the content.

About the links: one thing you'll notice is that I have no external links on this site, other than the link at the bottom of the page promoting the AdSense Case Study, which you wouldn't find on a normal site. One of the best strategies you can use is to minimize the number of external links on your pages. This makes clicking the ads a natural exit point for your visitors. You can have external links, just don't go overboard with them.

Conversely, you want lots of internal links to keep the visitor on your site. Make it easy for them to navigate from page to page. The more pages they see, the more likely they'll be to click an ad.

More on this tomorrow… Stage 3 will start shortly, and it's all about placing images on the site as the first attempt at making it prettier.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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