Optimize your blog for AdSense

I've been revisiting the AdSense patent when someone I know asked me for advice on how to get more relevant ads for their blog. You see, they face the classic blogger's problem: too many references to blog-related keywords (”blog”, “blogging”, “feed”, “RSS”) drown out the real keywords in their postings. (Ironically enough, I bet I'll have the same problem with this particular posting.) So, fresh from my re-analysis of the patent (I hate reading those things), here's my list of tips on optimizing your blog for AdSense:

• Avoid blogging-related words whenever possible. Sure, it's a blog, but so what? If you're setting up a new blog, make sure that the URL (particularly the domain name) doesn't include “blog” in it. I made this mistake when I setup this blog, I should have installed the blogging software under a more innocuous name like “news” or “talk” or even a single letter like “b”. Don't call the blog “My Blog” or something similar.
• Use section targeting to exclude blogging-specific terms. The next best thing is to exclude the words that are going to trigger blogging ads instead of the more relevant ads you want to see. Especially wrap the section targeting around any links that include blog-related keywords in them, as often happens with feeds.
• All your pages need titles, and they better include keywords. The patent refers directly to titles, you know!
• Keywords in most titles and headings. I know it can be hard sometimes, but it really helps. Use the Google Suggest Explorer to brainstorm for relevant and well-searched keywords.
• Use heading tags. For the title and subtitle of your blog, and for the titles of the individual posts. I've seen some blogs use <div> tags to mark off the different parts of a post. While this will look well, you don't get the SEO (search engine optimization) benefit of having actual <h1>, <h2>, etc., tags in the text.
• Permalinks should include keywords. This depends on the blogging software, but most such software has an option to generate permalink pages that include all or part of the post title in the URL instead of just a post number.
• Make your titles links. The anchor text of the links on the page are important clues to AdSense. And since you've made those keyword-rich, turning them into links only helps. Especially try to make the post title a link to the permalink page for the post, since the URL to the page will be rich in keywords if you've followed all the other advice.
• Choose good category names. If you use categories, choose relevant keywords for them. They'll show up in the URLs that are generated and on the pages themselves.
• Categorize consistently. The AdSense patent assumes that web pages in the same folder (here we're assuming that the category gets represented as a directory part of the URL) are related, so the content of all the posts in the same folder end up affecting each other.
• Write with SEO in mind. This should mostly happen naturally, but you can try to help things along a bit with the occasional bolding or italicizing of important words, using lists, choosing good anchor text for any links you embed, and so on. (Standard SEO techniques are extremely important if you read the patent.)

This may seem like a lot of things to worry about, but many of these things happen automatically with popular blog templates that have been optimized for AdSense already, or can easily be added to existing templates. And most of these tips help get your pages in the right spots in the search engines, too, so they're doubly beneficial.

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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