Online Marketing Today

I received an insightful little email from a friend of mine the other day which I thought you might be interested in – particularly if you participate in the Google Adsense program.

It contains a very easy to implement tip to help fine tune the relevance of adsense ads displaying on your website. This is particularly useful if you’re getting irrelevant ads being displayed and/or a poor click through rate - not to mention the fact that this is also a very good search engine optimization practice when it comes to the overall structure of your website…

“Hi Duncan,

As you know I’m an adsense publisher, which is where the bulk of my site’s revenue comes from. Now the click through rate on adsense adverts is dependent on things like positioning, style and most importantly relevance.

For example, a page about “dog training” with adsense ads for “weight loss” is not going to get many click throughs compared with dog based adverts. You can fine tune adsense ad relevance by defining the portion of the page the adsense spider reviews, but I prefer to avoid this if I can. My experiments with adsense have led me to believe that it primarily looks at the page content and also the site context.

So if it can’t get a handle on the exact content of a pages meaning it falls back to “what it thinks the site is about”.

Now the relevance of this to search engine optimization is this.

If the adsense spider can’t figure out the page, then can Google the search engine?

After all, adverts are where Google’s money is, so it’s reasonable to assume they use similar algorithms if not better than the search system.

I’ve discovered all the usual things that cause Google to decide a page content such as titles, header tags etc but I had one page it just wouldn’t display relevant adsense adverts to.

The page was a series of photographs, each photo had a keyword relevant title and text content by it. The page had a proper title etc but it kept displaying adverts for “photograph albums” and “printing photographs”.

The page was about “vegetable growing” and the CTR was down below 0.5%!

I finally found an answer. I changed the name of the directory from “photographs” to “vegetable-growing”.

Within moments the page was displaying relevant adverts.

So, I learned that Google (adsense at least) pays quite a lot of attention to the name of the directory the file is located in. The implications for search engine optimization are obvious.”

…in addition to the above, I should also point out that this applies to your individual page naming as well. The Google Adsense spider will also pay close attention to the keyword terms used in the individual pages to help determine the relevancy of the ads being displayed.

And once again, in terms of organic search engine optimization, this is just good practice – using relevant keyword terms when naming both your directories and individual pages.

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