AdSense Case Study: The final stage begins
Finally, we get back to the AdSense case study. I'm sure you've all been (not) waiting with baited breath!
In truth, the Invisible Fence Guide is almost done. This final stage is a really a clean-up stage where we're going to do a few minor things:
- Move all the content into the root directory of the site. Right now the content is split across different folders: stage1, stage2, stage3, stage4. This is an artifact of the case study, but there are some merits to developing a site this way, as I'll discuss shortly.
- Make sure that all the necessary pages are in place. This means, among other things, making sure that there's a site map page somewhere.
- Speaking of sitemaps, we'll also use Google Sitemaps to make sure all the pages on the site get properly indexed.
- See where we're at in the different search engines and if there's anything we can do to fix any problems.
- Finally, we'll talk about ad placement and ad programs that are complementary to AdSense. Yes, I put ads on these pages right from the start and I'm pretty happy with where they are right now, but we can talk about where the ads could go. And about Chitika, of course. (I'm looking forward to seeing those audited figures!)
About developing your pages in a separate folder: one benefit to this approach is that you can place ads on your pages right away. If the ads aren't well-targeted, you can use section targeting and some careful rewriting to massage the page content to show the right ads. After the rewriting, you simply rename the folder and load up the pages in the browser again, causing the AdSense crawlers to come revisit the page (since the page URL is now different). You can do this as many times as you want until the targeting is just right, and then you move all the files to the root of the site.
This strategy is easiest to implement if all the web pages reside in a single folder and you use relative links to reference them. Then it's literally just a matter of copying the files up to the root (after the tuning) and you're done. When choosing names for you test folder(s), by the way, make sure you use something innocuous that isn't going to trigger any ads — remember that AdSense looks for keywords in the URL of the page as well as the content of the page itself.
Eric Giguere is the AdSense expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google. Subscribe to his AdSense newsletter for more tips and advice on AdSense and content monetization. His daughter doesn't really know what his book is about, but she likes the cover is very pretty.