AdSense Case Study: Why We're Making it Pretty

I was away unexpectedly over the weekend and the modem on my laptop wasn't working, but luckily I was able to “borrow” a WiFi connection on occasion to read some email. The connection was tenuous, though, and for example this morning I wasn't able to do anything at all with it. Now that I'm back at home, though, things will be back to normal.

Our current topic of discussion is my ongoing AdSense case study featuring the Invisible Fence Guide. We've written and optimized our content, now we're adding images to the mix.

Actually, it's not just images in the photographic sense, it's also images in the graphics sense. It may seem silly to you to spend an entire stage on this. After all, isn't content the key? Isn't everything else just fluff?

While there's no doubt that content is king (or queen!), the reality is that the humans reading your content — and let's not forget they're the ones you're writing the content for, not the search engines — want more than just content. They want a site that looks as good as it reads.

Why? It's human nature. There have been many studies that show, for example, that attractive people earn higher wages than their plain equivalents. When faced with two sites that are mostly equivalent except in their “attractiveness”, your first impression will be that the “attractive” site is the more “professional” site, the more “trustworthy” site. That's crap, of course, but it's the way our mental gears work.

That said, there are good reasons for prettying up your site. It can be as simple as making sure the text wraps at a reasonable column length — it makes the text easier to scan. It can help emphasize and separate the different parts of the page.

I'm not saying images will magically do that. You can build an attractive site without images. But images can add some pizzazz, some extra zing. If you can add them, do it. It's as simple as that.

That's why we're looking at images.

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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