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.
