The Correct Question to Answer

[Tia Wood]

Next time you are getting your website ready for ads like google Adsense, etc. Ask yourself "What will my visitors be interested in when they come here" instead of "What is my site's theme"?

There's a difference between the two and I see better results when I optimize for what my visitors would be interested in, rather than trying to match my theme.

Example: Let's say I'm running a gaming website. Should I optimize for gaming ads? No, my visitors already came to my website for that. I should optimize for entertainment or humor.

Or lets say I run a celebrity website. Should I optimize for the adult themes or for celebrities? No, I should optimize for things like fashion and movies.
It makes a big difference. Try it. It sure beats trying to trick people into clicking ads.

 

[Duckinla]

Excellent point. I have seen so many sites designed for google adsense where it is apparent that the designer forgot the goal. The ultimate goal is to get people to click on the ads!

 

[insomnia]

How would you optimize via adsense for example, without having to heavily keyword a "gaming" site with "humour" keywords?

 

[Tia Wood]

Easy, get away from Google Adsense lol. Simply put; I think Adsense is too `smart` for its own good. You get competitor ads showing, you get ads that shouldn't be there. In some cases, relevancy is great. But not in all cases.

I'd recommend switching to Adbrite. You get better control, you can choose categories, and receive better click throughs.

Even when I purchased paid advertising I got better click through rates than Adsense.

If you find yourself with a website that constantly brings up those default ads in Google, try switching to Adbrite and using topic categories instead.

 

[Duckinla]

My parked domains have an advertising click through rate of 19% so far this month. I have heard that for developed sites the average rate is well under 5%. It certainly seems there is a lesson for domain designers to learn from that. I'm not thinking so much of changing the ads as changing the thought process that goes into the domain design.
Work backwards, understand the ads and build the site around them. Make them a part of the design vs. building the site and then putting in the ads in the open spaces.

I am not a site developer, so this is just a theory.

Duck

 

[Tia Wood]

Bob Martin couldn't have said it better:

"In order to effectively serve more demanding advertisers, domainers will need to invest in content development, better keyword optimization and other Web analytics."

It's that `simple` guys: http://www.dnjournal.com/articles/series/martin1.htm

 

[Duckinla]

I'm glad you approved of that post because now I'm going to possibly show my ignorance.
I see people all the time mention high Google search results as some indication of value. I understand Overture search results and why they are valuable, but why are high Google search results important? If I understand it correctly, it just shows how many websites a keyword appears in wheras Overture shows how many times a keyword was searched. Wouldn't the best scenario for a keyword be high Overture and low Google? Wouldn't I want my website to be 1 of 10 rather than 1 of 1,855,353?
I must be missing something.

Thanks,

Duck