AdSense Keyword Targeting Tips

The Google Suggest Explorer keyword research tool (see my previous entry) has generated a number of comments and emails already, with the number one comment being about how the ads shown on the page are extremely well-targeted. No, I'm not doing anything fancy or mysterious. The ads are well-targeted for these simple reasons:

• The keyword is in the URL. AdSense doesn't wait until it crawls your page to display ads, it does its best guess based on things it knows about the page that don't depend on its content. Like whether there are any keywords in the URL. Note that every suggestion page in my tool has the keyword in the URL via the query parameter at the end of the URL. (And yes, search engines do look at query parameters nowdays, so it's perfectly fine to do this kind of thing.)
• The keyword is in the title. Look at the top of the page. There's the keyword you're searching on.
• The keyword is in a heading. The <h1> tag includes the keyword.
• The keyword is near the top of the text. It's in the first paragraph after the <h1>.
• The keyword is bolded. You know, like this.
• The keyword is in the anchor text of at least one link. Since I'm converting the results returned by Google Suggest into links, this happens naturally.

Do the same thing and you'll get well-targeted ads on your pages. You don't have to do all of the above, either, just the majority of the techniques. You don't need to use section targeting, either. (Because, as I've always argued, section targeting is best used to exclude unwanted content from the AdSense targeting algorithms.)

The most surprising thing to most people is the importance of the keywords in the URL. Yes, this would let you build a set of pages that have very little content (say an image library) and still get well-targeted ads. Just study the AdSense patent (I have a quick summary of it available in PDF if you want it) and you'll learn all kinds of things like this…

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

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