My posting schedule's going to be a little light over the Christmas holidays, though I'll try to get my AdSense newsletter out shortly since it's behind schedule. (Don't forget to subscribe and get your chance at winning a signed copy of my book!)
Today's topic is searching engine optimization, perhaps one of the most important things an AdSense publisher can do to get traffic. A well-optimized page ranks highly in the search engines for specific keyword phrases. For many sites, it's through searching that new visitors find your site, so it's important to always think about what you're doing with the different parts of your page. Even bloggers using a standard blogging template should consider tweaking the template if necessary — it's not that hard, really.
For example, Graywolf is running an interesting experiment about page titles in his blog, trying to figure out what's the optimal type of page title to get good rankings in the popular search engines. Among the “in-page” SEO factors, page titles are one of the most important factors. In the Invisible Fence Guide, for example, I've been using keyword-rich page titles and I'm convinced it's helped the site rankings. Graywolf's experiment seems to support this, though he's saying that for good Google rankings you should also have the name of the site appended to the title. The truth is, of course, that only the people at Google, Yahoo! and MSN know for sure what really works and what doesn't work, all we can do is test things out. But it's good to keep an eye out for these kinds of experiments and to write your pages accordingly.
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.