Ever wondered how to select the best keywords for your Adsense websites? Your focus is earning money as well as attracting organic traffic towards your website. Here is what you need to know while choosing a keyword, a scientific study that maps the ideal keywords for your next upcoming adsense website.

We shall first study how to choose keywords that lead to more Adsense money.

CPC - Advantages and Drawbacks

What does CPC indicate?

When we think of high paying keywords, the first thing that pops up in our mind is CPC. CPC (Cost Per Click) is the maximum amount of money an advertiser is willing to pay for a click. Higher the CPC of a particular keyword, more will be the payouts you can expect by targeting that keyword in your AdSense websites. You can get the most accurate CPC from the source itself - Google.

However, CPC is not the only factor that tells the profitability of a keyword. There are many other factors that you should consider.

Drawbacks of CPC

- What if there are no advertisers bidding on a keyword having high CPC? Obviously, it means no one is going to pay you that high for a click.
- What if the traffic on the keyword is technical enough and does not click on ads (banner blindness)?
- What if Google gets loads of traffic on that keyword, enough to fulfill the desires of high paying advertisers? In this case, Google will only throw remaining peanuts towards you.

Obviously, Google will like to keep all the high paying ads within its own pages. So you see, CPC just shows you a small part of the entire picture. We shall explore the rest part of the picture...

Number of Sponsors - The Most Important Figure

Keywords with high CPC do not always come with high number of advertisers. There are many keywords in Google's Adwords system that have a high price, but almost no or very less number of advertisers. Now, if you build a web page or website around a keyword on which no one is bidding, Google will try to fill the ad blocks with ads of the related keywords rather than the high paying keyword you were initially targeting. There is no guarantee that ads of the related keywords will be good converters. Therefore, there is every likelihood that your clicks will be passed through SmartPricing Filter, eventually resulting in lesser payouts.

Hence, it is important to see the number of sponsors bidding on the keyword in question. If there are more the advertisers, there will be more competition among them to get the top position. This means that there will be more revenue per click that they are willing to share with you. In other words, more sponsors mean more people fighting against one another other to pay you more Adsense money.

Number of clicks on an Ad

It refers to the number of clicks an advertiser gets when his ad appears on the top. If the number of clicks and number of advertisers is less, just ignore those keywords, no matter what their CPC is. However, if the clicks per month are lower than expected, but the number of advertisers is a good one - it's the right choice for you. Such keywords are called "Niche AdSense' keywords." Here the word 'niche' is used in commercial context. This means that Google is not able to generate traffic on such keyword ads. This makes it difficult for it to exhaust the advertising budgets of the advertisers. Therefore, in order to meet its targets, Google happily shares high paying ads with you, resulting in more payouts. Try to find such "Niche AdSense' keywords."

Coming to Higher number of clicks - It indicates:

Either the traffic segment is ignorant about the online advertising concepts, and click on these ads unknowingly. This means you will experience higher CTR on your ads when placed at appropriate place. You don't have to put in much efforts to fight banner blindness.

Or, the traffic is highly commercial and willing to purchase the advertised product over internet. This means that there are very little chances of your facing the SmartPricing phenomenon.

Number of clicks along with the other stats like Number of sponsors and CPC, can enable you to make more wise decisions while choosing keywords for your AdSense content.

Bidding Quality

It's important to see the pattern in which people are bidding on a keyword. Suppose there are 400 advertisers bidding on a keyword. The top 20 of these are paying something like $15 per click, while the rest of them pay somewhere between $2 and $0.05. Now you might have found some decent tools that give you the average of top 3 or top 5 positions which is good, but not good enough. The point is that although the top 20 advertisers are paying higher, but the rest 380 advertisers are paying quite low. There is a high probability of your getting the ads of those 380 sponsors. Therefore, the average of the top 20 advertises can be really misleading. The solution to this problem is discussed in the later part of this page.

We have enough Adsense money now. Let's build some traffic on your website.

Traffic Building for AdSense:

Choosing Niche Keywords

Niche keywords are the keywords that are highly searched by the web surfers, and are rarely used by your competitors. Less competition means more traffic to your website. Targeting ten niche keywords is easier and more fruitful that targeting a highly competitive keyword. Traffic from niche keywords when directed to a relevant page increases your CTR and conversion ratio.

Determining Competition

People generally take the number of results returned by search engines as the number of pages competing on a keyword. But it is wrong. The Search Engine Results get irrelevant after 10 - 15 pages. Irrelevancy further increases with the depth. The pages that have the keyword dumped in a corner are not competing against you, but search engines will still list them. In fact they have to.

It is assumed that if a webmaster is targeting a web page with a particular keyword, the keyword is used in the title as well as in the anchor text linking to that webpage. Such a page is listed higher by the search engines as it is dedicated to what you searched for. So how to filter out the most relevant results? Check it out!

Inanchor intitle and Its Precision - The Solution

In Google, you can easily determine the EXACT number of pages that are competing against you. You can precisely list out the pages that are using a particular keyword in their page titles or in the anchor texts linking to them.

The query can be applied as follows: intitle:keyword inanchor:keyword.

For example, if the keyword is "hair treatment", the formula will be used in the following manner: intitle:hair inanchor: hair intitle: treatment inanchor: treatment. This figure gives you the exact number of pages that are ACTUALLY Targeting with these keywords, and not those that have just created a page or a small paragraph on the same topic. Google emphasizes on Anchors and Page titles. That's the reason, it supports such a search query.

We shall now discuss some other traditional ways to determine competition.

R/S Ratio

Here, R refers the number of competitor websites for a particular keyword as per the search result of the search engine. And S refers the number of searchers using that keyword while searching their queries. This means that for better results, you have to choose the keywords with lower R/S ratio.

R/S ratio becomes polluted when someone uses the number of results as the number of competing websites. As explained above, counting the number of results as the number of competing pages is the biggest mistake one can make while choosing a keyword. However, the figure becomes quite useful when inanchor intitle is used to create R/S.

KEI Analysis

KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index) is a formula for measuring the effectiveness of a keyword. The formula was devised by Sumantra Roy. However, this figure also depends upon the number of searches and competition, but with a difference. This formula analyzes the number of searches and competition in such a way that if the searches increase, KEI increases; and if the competition increases, KEI decreases. Higher the KEI, more profitable will be the keyword. However, it becomes polluted when the number of search results are used as the number of competitors.

Determining Traffic

Determining traffic for a keyword is quite important before targeting it. Along with the competition stats, it lets you make out the niches present in any industry. Besides, it lets you predict (to some extent) how much traffic you can expect if you promote a website around a particular keyword. There are two known sources for determining traffic. Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool (now a part of Yahoo Search Engine) and WordTracker. When talking about accuracy, Wordtracker monitors the queries on some meta search engines that actually render it inaccurate . Reason? There is no known stat about how much of the community you are targeting is searching on those meta search engines. However, it's a good tool to make out the niches.

In my opinion, Yahoo owned Overture gives you more accurate stats than Wordtracker. This is for the reason that Overture is a PPC engine. It can show you how many people are searching for a particular term on its vast network. A network which is bigger than any Meta Search Engine. Still, it is not that accurate, but at least better than Wordtracker. The tools that are predicting Google Searches for you are just doing guess work. No one knows the algorithm they use.

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?
I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Directories are often over emphasized - "they are the most important part of your website promotion", or under utilized - "I don't know any directories other than Dmoz or Yahoo so I'll just submit to them and see what happens".

The role directories can play lies somewhere in the middle. I like to use them as the backbone of my link building strategy. The reasons for this are simple:

1. If you choose right they generally always accept your website - there's not many things quite as frustrating as sending out 100 link requests and only hearing back from 10!

2. Their pages are optimized around a certain theme - this means that the page title and the rest of the content on the actual page your link ends up on will often correspond with the theme of your website.

3. Many directories have good Page Rank (4+) which implies good link popularity.

4. The people who build directories "generally" understand SEO and so limit the number of links on a page to 20 at the most - useful for passing Page Rank.

5. Niche directories can be a good source of direct traffic and assist your branding efforts in your particular market.

6. If you're willing to spend a little bit of money the turn around time of getting accepted is normally only a few days.

7. Many directories allow flexibility in the anchor text of your link - for example my link could be Make Money With Adsense, rather than just my domain name - Understanding Adsense. This is important in telling the search engines what your website is about and improving your rankings for your target keywords.

This is only a summary of the good points. There are thousands of directories online, many of which have been set up purely to take a submission fee from unsuspecting website owners. A proper strategy is fundamental to successful directory submission. A good starting point is my website Which Directories.

Search engine optimization is the process of doing certain things so as to rank higher in the search engines - particularly Google, MSN and Yahoo.

If you get listed higher in these three search engines for the search terms that match what your website is actually offering, then you will receive free targeted traffic whose conversion on Adsense will be very good as the ads will match what they're looking for.

The aim of search engine optmization is to tell the search engines what you are relevant to - you are basically trying to tell them which search terms you should rank highly for.

The content on your webpages will already be doing this for you. For example, this page is relevant to "search engine optimization", whereas my home page is relevant to "making money with Adsense". Each page is about a different topic and will therefore be related to different search queries but there are various techniques you can use to stress each pages relevancy to different keyword phrases.

This is called Onpage Optimization and includes:

1. Including a keyword rich title on the page,

2. The appropriate use of Meta Tags,

3. Using Header Tags for your main and secondary keywords,

4. Including your keywords in the content of your page,

5. The appropriate keyword density and placement.

By doing all of this, Google will therefore know that my home page is about "Making Money With Adsense" but how does it determine how valuable it is in relation to other websites which stress they too are about "Making Money With Adsense". How does it determine which order these websites should appear in when someone searches for that term.

Here the second part of seo comes into play which has been named Offpage Optimization or Link Building.

By analyzing the linking structure of the internet the search engines hope to work out which websites and which webpages are more valuable. A link from another site to yours is considered as a kind of endorsement - a vote in your favour.

The aim with link building is to have a good supporting linking structure which pushes you up the search engine rankings and holds you on the first page. There are many ways to get inbound links to your website including:

1. Submitting your website to directories.

2. Exchanging links with other websites (this is called reciprocal linking).

3. Including your website in your forum signature or when you leave comments on other peoples websites or blogs.

4. Submitting articles (which include a link to your site) to many of the internets article directories which other webmasters then take and place on their own sites.

5. By buying text links from one of the internets many text link brokers.

6. By advertising on or becoming a sponsor of another website.

But beware - before you spend months trying to get links from every website you come across the twist in the tale is that not every link carries the same weight. What you want is high value links. The factors which affect the value of a link include but are not limited to these:

- Whether the website is a highly regarded website - an "authority" site.
- Whether the website and it's webpages have a high page rank (note that page rank can be a good indication of value but is not absolute in its accuracy).
- Whether the title of the page and it's content matches or is related to your target keywords
- How many other external links there are on the linking page - there should be no more than 20 links on this page
- The number of steps from the home page that the link page is.
- The anchor text that you can use in the link - you want to be able to use your target keywords and not your business name.
- Who links to the page and to the site?

Please note that this page is an inevitable simplification of search engine optimization in order to give a basic grasping of it. Search engines are constantly evolving the ways in which they rank websites and so search engine optimization must too constantly evolve. It's importance in relation to Adsense is it's ability to drive LOTS of free and targetted traffic to your website and as this websites continues to grow we will cover it in much more depth.

Successful Adsense publishers know one thing. Real money with Adsense has nothing to do with Adsense. The optimization strategies that haunt every forum, blog and article are only a very small part of the story of receiving a sizeable monthly cheque from Google.

The fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic. Without traffic, no Adsense clicks, regardless of how precisely you’ve picked your placements or how much time you’ve spent perfectly blending the ads into the structure of your content so that they now appear as additional links and not advertisements.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers forget this very important fact and focus on solely trying to improve their click through rate. Finding your optimum click through rate is extremely important but cannot take precedence over traffic as without the latter you can not find the former.

If you obsess about optimization before you’ve fleshed out your site and expanded its reach into the search engines you will never actually develop your website and even if you get your CTR up to something quite formidable you will only be making a fraction of what you would be if you’d focused on your sites expansion.

So what should you do? If the fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic, the fundamental rule of traffic is that you can’t get a repeat visitor until they’ve been a first time visitor, and a first time visitor can only come to your website through a certain number of channels.

Putting advertising aside as unless you’re playing the arbitrage game you won’t convert on the margins, you are left with two serious options - the search engine results and incoming links from other websites. The latter supports the former so I always concentrate on getting as many pages under as many keywords into the search engines as are related to the particular website I’m working on. This is Search Engine Optimization territory.

With SEO you are trying to force the search engines to recognize your website and individual pages within it as relevant to particular keywords. What you’re trying to say is that “my website is more relevant, and so more valuable, to that keyword search than the first ten that are already there”. The more times you can convince the search engines of this the more traffic your website will receive. The more traffic your website receives the more clicks it will generate on Adsense and the more money you will make.

Focus on working out which keywords are related to your particular niche, build content of value that answers the question of each keyword phrase and then get supporting links to back up your relevancy. If you do this for your website you will significantly increase your traffic. Once your traffic is organic and automated turn to optimizing your Adsense ads through testing different placements, colors, formats etc. Once you’ve done that, this website can be left pretty much on auto-pilot and you can turn your attention to the next project where you will be very easily able to replicate what you’ve just done. Now you’re into Adsense Empire Building territory and this is where the “real” money lies.

As soon as you've mastered Adsense on one site the natural thing to do is build another. Another becomes another and so forth and within about a year or two you can have your own empire generating a massive monthly income.

The hard thing about succeeding online is the learning curve. You've got to put in a good 6 months to a year absorbing everything before you start to come out the other side.

Money is harder to find in this time but once you're afloat applying what you've learnt to many different markets is a doddle and you make more than enough money to compensate for the harder times before.

With Adsense based websites there's no point building wide until you have mastered the fundamentals.

For an Adsense site this includes - website building, understanding Adsense, search engine optimization and link building. A good grasp of affiliate programs will also help you supplement your Adsense income and knowing how to navigate your way around Adwords will allow you to test your templates and integration before finalising a particular model.

Once you've mastered these things then this is the forumla for Adsense Empire Building:

1. Choose a Niche - A niche is a self-contained market which focuses around a particular question or type of product. An understanding of the internet, the different markets and the tools available to assist your research is critical.

2. Working out the keyword pyramid for that niche - every niche has a keyword pyramid which is made up of the words people use to find things related to that niche. At the top is the most commonly used search term (Adsense would be Adsense), and at the bottom, the multitude of variations, for example - "which adsense ad color generates the most clicks" To maximize your free search engine traffic, your content will want to cover as much of this pyramiid as possible.

3. Planning the website - Now you've chosen your niche and have sketched the content that will be neccessary to meet it you'll then need to create this content, be it your own or from a third party and also work out how to integrate Adsense into it.

4. Build the website - Putting the bricks and mortar together - if you're not already using XSitePro you should be!

5. Get some traffic to the website - Basic directory submissions, preliminary reciprocal links, using Adwords, forum and blog postings will all start the trickle of traffic to your website. This will allow you to:

6. Optimize your Adsense - by testing your Adsense Format, Placement, Colors etc on your traffic you'll be able to work out which combination(s) they are most responsive to. The aim is to reach the optimum for that website so that it can be left pretty much on auto-pilot.

7. Focus on getting more traffic - This is the real task behind your project and will require link building and search engine optimization in all of it's variations.

8. Monitoring and Maintenance - Keep an eye on your Adsense reports and optimize if you still feel there is room for improvement, plus have some type of ongoing but easy to manage link building strategy in place so that your website keeps developing in the eyes of the search engines.

9. Repeating the process - that's one site down, onto the next.

I'm in the process of doing a lot of research into Adsense Empire Building so there will be lots of new material appearing on the site in the coming months. Keep your eye out.

Even if you have taken advantage of the nature of Adsense ads and have optimized your website accordingly - namely: view Adsense ads as supplemental content and not ads, integrate them into the actual content of the webpage and not solely into the header or navigation, use a larger rectangle shape ad near the very top of your content, and potentially another one at the bottom, your Adsense performance will probably still only be a fraction of what it could be.

The reason for this is that modifications to the actual ad and it's positioning are only half the story of succeeding with Adsense. There is such a thing as a perfect Adsense page and what this is is the type of page that will generate the greatest number of clicks. The perfect page will meet the criteria listed below and the click through rate will be extremely high.

1. The Page Is about One Self-Contained Topic

The purpose of content websites is to reveal information to their visitors. The perfect Adsense page is focused on one particular topic and serves to reveal information about that topic. This has several benefits. Firstly, it makes it easier to get good search engine listings which will bring you relevant traffic. Secondly, the traffic will have come to that page for the sole reason of looking for the information which the page will actually reveal - they will therefore be more responsive to ads related to that content. Finally, your page will generate more targeted ads as your content focusing will have made it easier for Google's technology to analyze and match ads. The more related the ad the more clicks it will receive.

2. The Content on the page is not too comprehensive

Now while you want to be revealing information about one topic, you do not want to be the definitive resource for that topic. You do not want your reader to be "full" by the time they have finished your article. If you have completely satisfied their curiosity on that topic they are going to be less likely to look for further information in your cleverly placed Adsense ads. Content should be interesting and insightful and the reader should feel like he's learnt something but not everything. The perfect article makes more curious - encourages the readers search for information.

3. The Page Breaks The Back Habit

As search engines dominate the way that the internet is explored an important task of every website is to break the habit of people clicking on the back button. If someone comes to your website from a search engine listing and doesn't immediately relate to your page they will go back to the search engine and try another website. If they've gone backwards, they can't go forwards through your Adsense ads. People move through the internet very quickly and so your website should seek to connect with the person instantly. There are several aspects to achieving this:

• Keep your page kb size small (below 50kb) so it loads quickly - no one likes to wait.
• Have a good page title which relates perfectly to what the search engine visitor will be expecting to find.
• Your first paragraph is to the point and pulls someone in to your website
• The clever use of images - in terms of immediate responsiveness people often relate better to images than to words - they trust them more. The appropriate use of images in your banner or at the top of your page can pull people into your website.

4. The Way The Page Is Laid Out and Reads Should Flow Forward

This is a continuation of breaking the back habit. Once you've got your visitor involved then your page should flow forward and if done correctly the Adsense ads will be used as a continuation of that flow.

5. The Page Pre-Sells what the ads are offering

If you were promoting a particular product through a sales letter your aim would be to pre-sell it. Talk enthusiastically and knowledgeably (your visitor must believe that you know more than him) about your topic - your visitor should want more on the subject and your Adsense Ads should provide them with this more.

5. Limit The Number of Navigation Links on Your Page

A visitor has three choices - they can go back to where they came from, they can click the x button or they can click on another link on your webpage. If you've suceeded in breaking the back habit and you've not completely resolved the question he came to your site to find an answer to, then he will look for another link. This is what you want your visitors to do and if you want them to click on your Adsense ads you want to limit the amount of choices that they can make.

6. Give Your Visitors Nowhere else to go

An Adsense ad at the end of your content often converts well. If the visitor has read your article through then they will by this time be well away from your navigation links. If you want maximum performance from your ads don't include links to other pages on your website at the bottom of your page or place links to other resources which they may find useful, or make a suggestion that they go and do something. This works especially well on pages that are built around one self-contained topic. The ads are then used as a further resource as the visitor has nowhere to go but forward.

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Now, unless you create a website exactly around this model, your own website will inevitably diverge from it in several ways.

For example, the flaws in UnderstandingAdsense.com when placed against this idea of a perfect page are:

• Although each page is generally about one self contained topic they are not great for the search engines. Pages built around keywords like Adsense Tips, Adsense Secret, Adsense Website and Optimizing Adsense would result in more direct search engine traffic.
• On each page I try to be as comprehensive as possible and often highlight further resources and use examples for which I receive no commission.
• Although I am talking enthusiastically about Adsense I am not pre-selling the Ads as each article will bring you further into the site rather than encouraging you to look elsewhere.
• I have not limited the number of navigation links on each page.

But these negatives are offset in this case by the aim of creating a workable and integrated resource. If I'd built this site with the aim of it being a strict search engine traffic, Adsense optimized website then it's pages would be built much closer to the perfect page model. You have to decide where your own project lies and build accordingly.

The first rule of integrating Adsense into your website is to acknowledge that your visitors will see and interact with your Adsense ads the way you see them and have consequently integrated them. If you think of the time you have spent deciding colors, site structure, images and everything else that makes your website, the same amount of energy and precision should go into getting Adsense just right on your webpages.

As you have complete control over the design and layout of your webpages, you also have complete control over how a visitor interprets and ultimately interacts with your pages - and this includes your Adsense Ads.

First and foremost, the size and placement of your ads suggests to the visitor how he or she ought to interact with them. For example,

1. If you use a 728 x 90 leaderboard at the top of your page you are saying to your visitors - "here are some ads which I do not consider to be actually part of my website but I hope that they will catch your eye as you look to the actual content of my website".

2. If you use a 120 x 600 skyscraper in either your left or right navigation you are saying to your visitor, these ads are like my navigation, something extra to the page which you are currently on and to be used like the rest of my navigation if something in them takes your fancy.

3. If you use one of the square or rectangle shapes inside your actual page content, you are saying to your visitors that "these ads are integral to the content of this page and should be read as you are reading the rest of these words - as content relating to the actual page topic".

Needless to say the last of these will always perform better than the other two examples.

View Adsense ads as supplemental content to your page content, integrate them into the structure of your webpages that way and your visitors will interact with them that way giving you a much higher click through rate.

This is the first step to success with Adsense. If you view Adsense as just an easy way to make a couple of extra dollars that's all you will do with it. If you take the time to structure your website and integrate Adsense so as to supplement the page content your click through rate and your earnings will go through the roof.

There are many ways to do this successfully and many different sites that Adsense can work on.

You will succeed with Adsense when your visitors wilfully look to them as a source of supplemental information to what your webpage provides. Therefore, if there is such a thing as a trick to succeeding with Adsense it is not to see Adsense Ads as advertisements.

The reason for this is that no one likes ads. Why? Because we're surrounded by the buggers.

Advertisements are viewed as an intrusion, Adsense Ads should be seen and integrated as a further resource for your website visitors.

The reason this is achievable with Adsense is down to the very nature of the ads:

1. The Adsense Ads are related to the content of the page that you put them on

The reason that Adsense is so popular and so effective at monetizing traffic is that the ads that appear on your website will be related to the content of each individual webpage. If you build a website about home insurance, then the ads on it will be about home insurance, if you build a website about Nike shoes then that's what the ads will be about and so forth. If integrated into your website correctly they're actually useful to your visitor and if something is useful it gets paid much more attention.

2. Adsense Ads are customizable

To not just be an ad, real integration into your website is necessary. The different format sizes and the color palettes all facilitate the integration of the ads into the fabric of your website.

3. The quality of the Ads

In the internet world Google is on top. Consequently, Google's advertising program - Adwords is used by thousands and thousands of quality businesses to reach their intended audience. This means that every niche market has a good selection of advertisers all writing carefully scripted ads to relate to the people using your website.

4. Because the Ads automatically change

Not only is the ad pool very large, the advertisers and the ads keep on changing. This keeps all your ads abreast of market trends as the advertisers constantly strive to better each other and themselves. The ads appearing on your site will evolve as your market evolves. Secondly, and this is important for sites that receive repeat visitors - your ads will often be different. If the same person reads the samepage twice in a two week time period they're more likely to click on ad both times if they are different each visit.