This is final video from the Google  webmaster educational series – “Speeding up in a Slowdown”.

In this video you will hear tips from Christian Ashlock, a Google AdSense Optimisation team manager, about attracting additional advertiser spend. Christian manages an AdSense optimisation team at Google that works to help publishers get the most out of their AdSense accounts.

Once you create a site with great content and great ad inventory, the best way to earn additional revenue is to make sure advertisers can find you. Christian shares two important tips that will help persuade advertisers to spend money on your site, and a third tip to help you access a new pool of advertisers you may not currently be reaching.

Tip #1: Define ad placements in AdSense so that AdWords advertisers can find them and bid directly for them.

Ad Placements are simply Custom Channels that you can expose to advertisers to encourage more placement targeting spend on your site. Ad placements are most effective for sites with lots of different topics or with different sections like articles, a blog, and a forum. You can set up ad placements based on specific categories of interest on your site, like fine arts or sports. You can also set up ad placements to cater to advertisers who are more interested in specific ad unit locations, like above the fold placements, or popular ad unit sizes including the 300×250 medium rectangle or 728×90 leaderboard.

Tip #2: Help advertisers find your inventory outside of AdWords.

Google Ad Planner is a media planning tool that advertisers use to find sites for their media buys. With the recently launched Publisher Center in Ad Planner, you can claim your site and provide information that helps advertisers better understand your content, audience and advertising options. You can also share your Analytics data with Ad Planner to ensure that advertisers see the most accurate traffic numbers for your site. All of this will help advertisers who use Ad Planner as a media planning tool understand the value of your site, and may even help new advertisers learn that your site exists!

Tip #3: Tap into a new set of advertisers: search advertisers.

Google has relationships with many advertisers — some advertise on Google.com, some advertise on our partner sites through the AdSense program, and many do both. You can tap into advertisers who choose to advertise on our search partner sites by using AdSense for Search. AdSense for search lets your site’s visitors find what they’re looking for on your site and across the web. Just like on Google.com, we’ll display ads targeted to what your visitor is looking for along with the search results.

Thanks for following this educational series, I hope you’ve gained a better understanding of the tools and resources you can use to improve your website and your AdSense earnings!

If you have any final suggestions for growing your business, I hope you’ll leave them as comments.

If you found this educational series helpful, why not subscribe to my Blog by RSS Feed or Email and receive free Professional SEO Tips and Market News, direct to your inbox.

In addition to optimising the individual pages of your website, for your targeted keywords, it is absolutely vital that you also improve the Link Popularity of your site, by securing one way links from as many external websites as possible. Ultimately it is your linking strategy that will deliver high rankings on Google and other search engines.

However this is not a simple numbers game, as the quality of your links play a significant role in deciding your ultimate position on Google. With only a small number of high quality One Way Links, it is possible to outrank a website that has many inbound links. If a website has a high volume  of one way links, it does not mean that it will automatically rank highly for every keyword, as Google decides the position of a website in its search results by analysing both on page and off page factors.

On page factors represent elements that are already present on all of your web pages. These “elements” are within your control and can be amended where necessary, in order to make your web pages as search engine friendly as possible. These changes are what is commonly referred to as “Search Engine Optimisation”.

The primary Web Page Optimisation tasks should concentrate on the following:

• Make sure that Title, Description and Keywords Meta Tags are present on each page of your website.
• Make sure that each set of Meta Tags contain unique content, that is relevant to the topic of each page.
• Do not duplicate the content in your Tags across every web page.
• Your Title Tag is the most important, make sure that it contains relevant targeted keywords.
• Make sure that the text on each page is also optimised for your targeted keywords.
• Check that all the relevant page links have been correctly coded, to ensure that search engines can navigate your site correctly and are able to find all your pages.
• Check that the HTML code of your web pages is error free to enable search engine spiders to easily parse your pages?
• Check that your web pages are free of all spam elements and there is no hidden text, no disguised redirects and no keyword stuffing.

Off page factors represent the elements that cannot be found within your web pages and primarily relate to improving the link popularity of your website.

These factors should focus on the followng:

• How many websites link to your site?
• Are these inbound links from related high quality pages?
• Do social bookmark websites link to your website?
• Do the links to each web page contain the relevant, targeted keywords.

All of these factors are important in order to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines.

Why is link popularity important?

If you wish to achieve high rankings on Google for a specific targeted keyword, you must optimise one of your web pages for that keyword. If the web page optimisation has been performed correctly and meets all of the criteria mentioned above, then Google will list it in the search results.

Obviously, there will be many competitive websites, that will be targeting the same keyword as your website. If more than one web page has been optimised for the same keyword, then Google will list the web pages with the best quality inbound links in the highest positions. For example, if 10 websites have been optimised for the keyword “blue widgets” then the website that has the most one way links, that contain the keyword “blue widgets” as part of as the link text, will achieve the best position on Google.

If your website meets all on page requirements and has the right number of quality links (which does not mean that it must have the most links) then you will achieve high search engine rankings. There are many ranking elements that will influence your position in Google’s search results. The more elements that meet Google’s requirements, the more likely it is that your website will be listed on page one of Google’s search results.

If you found this post helpful, why not subscribe to my Blog by RSS Feed or Email and receive free Professional SEO Tips and Market News, direct to your inbox. As ever, feel free to comment on this post.

It would seem that the official view from Google regarding the use of Geo Meta Tags, is that there is no major benefit to be gained, in terms of Web Page Optimisation.

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a video discussing this topic and states that Google attaches very little importance to assigning country association Geo Meta Tags, to your website.

You can watch Matt’s video below.

Geo Meta Tags are recognised meta tag elements that provide information on your website’s location and country.

According to Matt, there are more established elements Google can use to determine the home country of your website, including your IP address, top-level domain and association in Google Webmaster Tools.

An excellent tip, if you have different content (on subdomains for example), is that you can specify each of these in Google Webmaster Tools, and assign country associations to each specific page. This can be very handy if your website is available in multiple languages for example.

If you found this post helpful, why not subscribe to my Blog by RSS Feed or Email and receive free Professional SEO Tips and Market News, direct to your inbox.

Herewith further Google video from their webmaster educational series – “Speeding up in a Slowdown”.

Today, you will hear from Mel Ann and Tim, two AdSense Optimisation Specialists from Google’s Sydney, Australia office, as they walk you through a 5-step process to optimise the AdSense ads on your sites, and will also share tips that many publishers have found successful.

Step 1: Analyse your webpages

The first step to a successful optimisation is to analyse your webpages. Ask yourself the following questions as you think about where to place ads on your site:

• What type of content do you have? People interact differently on articles, forum, and video sites, for example, so think about how people will be interacting on your site.
• Where is visitor attention likely to be focused? You should place ads where your users are most likely to look, but make sure that they won’t get in the way of users trying to complete tasks on your site.
• How can you integrate ads into an area without getting in the way of your users? You can view a Heat Map we’ve put together showing where ads perform well, and keep in mind that above the fold ads and ads close to primary content tend perform better.
• Don’t forget to think about how advertisers would like to appear. If you can make your site more appealing to advertisers, while keeping the above tips in mind, you’re more likely to be able to attract advertisers and Placement Targeted ads.

Step 2: Set up custom channels

Custom Channels will help you figure out how different ad units are performing based on a number of variables you can choose, like placement, size, and color. Create a channel for individual ad units and categorise them to see how they’re performing. For example, you can track your leaderboard and medium rectangle to see which performs better, and use this information in step four below. Custom channels will also allow you to track and measure results from your optimisations.

Step 3: Optimise your ad unit design and placement

The next step is to look at color, position, and size of your ad units and optimise these for user experience, advertiser experience, and performance. We’ve found that the medium rectangle (300 x 250), wide skyscraper (160 x 600), and the leaderboard (728 x 90) tend to perform best. You can also opt in to image ads to receive rich media and video ads, which tend to perform well too. It’s important that you implement your ads in a consistent manner and in a way that is desirable to advertisers. Use colors effectively. Blend ads in, but not too much that users don’t see them. Borderless ads tend to work well, as does highlighting the link and URL. Test different colors and placements, and then keep the changes that perform best.

Step 4: Maximise revenue from multiple units

We recommend adding multiple ad units to your pages, while still keeping the user experience in mind when deciding on placements. You can use custom channel reporting to determine which ad unit performs best, and structure your page to optimise performance based on that. The highest paying ad we have for your site will be shown in the first ad unit that shows up in your HTML code. If you have a leaderboard at the top, but learn with custom channel reporting that a medium rectangle halfway down the page is outperforming it in terms of CTR and CPM, try putting the medium rectangle first in your HTML code. You can do this by switching the location in the HTML if you’re comfortable editing the code, or by changing the actual location of the leaderboard on the page.

Step 5: Track and measure results

The last step is to understand whether your optimisations have made a difference. Here, use the custom channels you set up earlier to Generate Reports on your different ad units. Generate reports on your custom channels and group results by channel (remember, this depends on how you’ve set them up) to see how different sizes, colors, and placements are performing. You can also look at placement targeting reports to see which ad units are receiving placement-targeted ads, and if they’ve resulted in improved performance.

We hope these steps and tips are informative, and strongly encourage you to take the time to try an optimisation on your own.

Hopefully Mel Ann and Tim’s tips will help you improve the optimisation of your Adsense campaigns and improve your earnings.If you found this post helpful why not sign up to our Blog and receive regular Professional SEO Tips by email or RSS feed.