Your AdSense income is affected by many different factors, including how much advertisers are willing to pay for ads and how much Google decides to take for its trouble. As for factors that you, as an AdSense user, can actually affect, site design, of all things, is probably the most important because the design of your site affects the way that search engines rank the site in search results. The higher your site ranks, the more traffic that hits your Web site, which means (potentially) more AdSense income.
Traffic translates into page views, and page views translate into clicks of your AdSense ads. The more clicks you get, the better your income. Naturally, you want to do everything you can to increase traffic to your site. Search engine optimization is your first step. Ensure that your site is optimized for search engines, and the traffic on your Web site will increase dramatically as your
search engine rankings rise.
People search for stuff all the time — that’s just what people do. We want information, and in the 21st century, the fastest way to find information is to go to a search engine. Now, if you have a Web site, you want those folks looking for pertinent info to be directed straight to your Web site rather than that other guy’s Web site one domain block over. You want your site to rank well in search engines — in other words, search engines like Google. In fact, ranking well in search engines is so important that Web site owners are willing to pay thousands of dollars each year
to ensure their sites rank as high as possible. Search marketing — the practice of creating marketing targeted at getting your Web site listed high enough in search engine rankings that it’s noticed by people — is a $12 billion a year industry and is one of the fastest growing marketing segments out there. The way you optimize your Web site so that it’s easier to find online is search engine optimization (SEO). Go figure. It’s kinda obvious, isn’t it? Where it
begins to look a little muddy is in defining what, exactly, is the best strategy to adopt when optimizing a Web site. I’m here to tell you, though, that even if the topic is a bit muddy, you can still follow a few guidelines — guidelines that make a big difference in where your site ranks in search results. The rest of this chapter lays out a few of these SEO truths in all their glory
