Website Optimization Techniques

One of the easiest ways to make money from a website that gets a good amount of pass-through traffic is to help visitors exit your site via Google AdSense.

Earnings range from a few cents per click up to over a dollar per click depending on the quality of your web pages and the quality and relevancy of the visitors to your pages, so please consider this before you dive in and plaster your site with Ads.

If you are not registered yet, it is free via a monetization button.

To make this work well, you need the Ads to be relevant, well positioned on your pages and blended in with your site theme.

Google publish hotspot data to suggest the most frequently clicked areas on a web page. These tend to be biased towards the top left corner of the page.

The hottest part is after the first paragraph of your main content [Heat-Map Image]. But you don’t necessarily want most of your visitors leaving your site immediately. Do you ???

My suggestion is that once they are ready to leave and they were not interested in buying your products and services or they simply had enough excitement on your pages, then make it easy for them to exit via AdSense or whatever relevant Ads you provide rather than your visitors simply closing their browser window.

I already mentioned positioning Ads in the hotspots such as in the article. You can also position Ads at the end and to the sides of your content.

I favour links at the end of articles e.g. link units and tower images or Ad units to the right side, depending on how it integrates with your page.

To get an idea for what Adsense Ads are likely to show up, you can actually test it live on your site. Also, you can select the geo-targeting you are after and play around with color schemes before you commit to your Ad formats and positioning.

To get hold of the free tool, surf to: this URL and download the AdSense Preview Tool.

After following the instructions to install it, you need to fire up Internet Explorer (enter a web URL into the Windows Explorer address bar if you are like me and normally use FireFox or another web browser). Then, when you right click on web pages, you will have access to this tool to preview what kind of Adsense Ads may appear on your site.

Credit to Dr. Andy Williams - ezSEO for making me aware of this tool via his newsletter.

p.s. I just noticed that the AdSense for search feature has been enhanced to allow you to help your visitors perform relevant searches that could result in generating revenue for you. Before you had to jump through some hoops to set up a custom search to monetize the search activity.

If you have any questions on what may have been advanced topics, please don’t hesitate to ask a question in the comments: