It shouldn’t really matter where you put your keywords, should it? As long as the right words are on the right page in the right numbers, that should be enough to get you relevant ads, right?
Wrong.
One of the strangest results that people have had using AdSense is that putting keywords in particular places on the page can have an effect on the ads the site receives.
The words used in the page’s URL will help Google to identify the subject of the content. The titles and subtitles are important place-holders for keywords, too. And there’s some evidence that mentioning the keyword at the beginning of the article — in the first few words, ideally — and at the end of the article can also play a role.
If you’re going to think about placement, then your titles should certainly be one area to which you pay attention.
Metatags though aren’t what they used to be, and in AdSense they’re barely anything at all. There’s a good chance that when it comes to deciding ad relevance, your metatags have no effect whatsoever.
That doesn’t mean that your metatags are completely irrelevant when it comes to AdSense. They aren’t. They’re only seem to be irrelevant when it comes to serving ads; they may still play a role in search engine optimization and getting your site indexed faster but don’t depend on your metatags alone to deliver the ads you want.
One place you can try dropping a keyword though is directly beneath the AdSense unit. I have found that playing with keywords in the text that appears close to the AdSense code has had an effect on the ads that appear in the unit.
With that in mind, you could play with your ads in all sorts of ways. If you had a site about camping for example, you might find that you’re getting lots of ads about tents and sleeping bags, which would be fine. But if you also wanted to make sure that one or two of your ads were about Yosemite or mobile homes, then mentioning those keywords once or twice on the page directly below the AdSense unit could give you ads for sites with that sort of content too.
Remember though that you’ll often find that you get ads that try to combine the main thrust of your site with the specific keywords. So if you had a site about gardening and you mentioned “cabbages” beneath the ad box, you’re more likely to get ads about growing cabbages than ads for cabbage recipes.
Experimenting with the placement of the keywords could allow you to control at least one or two of the ads you receive and help keep them varied. That’s definitely something to try.
Create a Custom Search Engine through the AdSense interface, and you’ll be able to optimize both your search box and the search results page. For most AdSense publishers, those choices are more than enough to win extra ad clicks from users who leave a site through a search box.
But you can do even more.
The formatting and refinement choices that Google provides through AdSense are only a small portion of all the options available to Custom Search Engine publishers. Create your own search engine not through AdSense but through the search engine’s own website at www.google.com/cse/, and you’ll have a lot more possibilities.
The first thing you’ll notice is that you’ll be asked whether you want to pay a fee to Google. You don’t. The fee is for sites that want to use a search engine without ads. If you want to earn from AdSense units next to search results, then you don’t need to pay anything. You can create the search engine you want, then earn income by connecting it to your AdSense account and pasting in the code.
If you’re using a WordPress blog, select the iframe as the hosted option and use the Google Custom Search Plugin. It’s an extension designed specifically for the Google Custom Search Engine.
Don’t forget to link your search engine with your AdSense account! Forget to make the link and Google will take all of the ad revenue for itself.
You’ll then be offered a range of different options that affect the search engine’s look and feel, including a number of different colored styles, each of which can be customized. You can even use CSS and Javascript, if you know how, to tweak the search engine element even further so that it matches
The appearance of the search box itself though is less important than how the results appear. As long as users can find the search box and recognize what it does, those that want to search will do so. Whether they click an ad once they’ve made that search will depend on the look and layout of the results page. The control panel of the Customer Search Engine will give you plenty of options to make the results page look like a trusted part of your site.
Where the Custom Search Engine’s control panel really makes a difference though is not in the appearance of the search engine but in its refinements, its autocompletions and in particular, its promotions.
Refinements are really an additional help for your users. They allow you to apply labels to the sites you’ve listed. The sites that match that label can then be searched exclusively or links to results within those sites may placed above the general results, allowing the user to narrow his or her search.
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