An SEO Guide to Adsense, Ads and Placement

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An SEO Guide to Adsense, Ads and Placement Posted: 08 Nov 2011 01:01 PM PST Posted by Cyrus Shepard The Internet is made of kittens, but it's paid for by advertising. SEOs don't talk about advertising much, perhaps because it's the conceptual opposite of “great content.” The truth is, advertising is the gasoline that runs much of the web. Without ad revenue, great sites we love like Search Engine Land, Smashing Magazine, and even Wired might cease to exist. Ads are great, but as SEOs we need to present them as the commercials that they are, not the main show. Optimizing for CTR the Old Way Not long ago, it was common to see sites like this dominating the SERPs. (Thanks to Michael Gray for the lead) When Panda struck, sites like this got hit hard, time and time again. Even websites with superior content were penalized if they contained over-aggressive ads above the fold. I don't know if the site above was penalized by Panda, but I'm guessing their traffic is not as healthy as it could be, and a simple layout change would help significantly. 1. Ads as a Ranking Factor The 2011 Ranking Factors showed a slight negative correlation between rankings and the amount of Adsense on a page. Several Panda updates have rolled out since this data was collected, and I would expect the relationship today to be even more negative. Although Adsense isn't the only game on the market, it's the one ad network SEOs get the most information from. Matt Cutts has said that his team sends one way messages to the Adsense team in order to help webmasters comply with Google quality guidelines. In April, after Panda hit, Adsense changed how they advocate best practices for ad placement. Gone (or at least tucked away) were the old heat maps. 2. Panda Friendly Layouts The new layouts specifically advocate for ads that do not push content below the fold. These are the types of layouts that should be safe no matter what kind of ads you run. You can see earlier versions in their one-click optimizer, but these older layouts don't go very far in placing content first. Use at your own risk. 3. Balance Your Template Footprint Ads are a component your template footprint. A template footprint is any non-unique content that appears on every page, as opposed to content that makes the page unique. It's best to keep your ratio of unique content to footprint as high as possible. If you can't reduce your template footprint, at least place your content in the highest, most prominent place possible in order to stay out of the penalty zone. 4. Future Proof Your Ads The new Adsense recommendations are great for this round of Panda, but what about next year? In my opinion, they represent the minimum of what you should do to avoid a penalty. The New York Times does a good job of balancing ads against content. Their strategy neither ignores users nor puts them at risk for near-future algorithm changes. Aggressive ads tend to alienate users, which can effect your bounce rate, time on site, pageviews and other user engagement metrics. All of these can have undesirable long term consequences. For publishers dedicated to long term profits, there is a better approach. 5. Beyond CTR – Smart Ways to Increase Ad Revenue It's true that higher click-through rates give webmasters incentive to place ads above content. But CTR isn't the only way to increase earnings. You can optimize several other factors to your long term advantage. If you are an Adsense publisher, you are familiar with these concepts. 1. Coverage 2. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) 3. Cost Per Impression (CPI or CPM) 4. Impressions All of these can be optimized for higher earnings. Number 4, impressions, is the most actionable from an SEO point of view. If you're producing great content and promoting it the right way, then your pageviews will soar. Here in the States, the SuperBowl will always make more in ad revenue than reruns of Murder, She Wrote. If you sell ads, be the SuperBowl of content publishers. Produce the best content you can, and you can sell your premium ad space for top dollar. Do you like this post? Yes No

Life After Google is Now: 9 Pieces of Advice on How a New Site Can Succeed Without Search Posted: 08 Nov 2011 03:05 AM PST Posted by Stephen This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Illustrated London News has a 170 year history as a content and print company. Recently we made the obvious move to bring one of our print publications online - PODIUM an intelligent view of sport. Our major articles are in-depth interviews with sports stars, our commentary is from globally renowned pundits and we often do our own photo shoots. Cover stars so far have been Usain Bolt and Frankie Dettorri. Other Articles have focused on Golf, F1, The All Blacks, horse racing and the 2012 Olympics. On the face of it, that sounds like an SEO's dream – rich, unique content that search engines will love. It's a pity that does not help us one little bit. Am I going to get Search Engine traffic for "Usain Bolt" on a brand new website? To beat his own website, his sponsor Puma, the BBC or The Guardian? Not a chance. So I decided to abandon the un-loyal scraps of long-tail search and to Design for Social This is the tale of what I did to grow traffic for www.thepodiummagazine.com/ when SEO wasn't a viable option. There is still a lot more to do, but I think we have learned enough that it's worth sharing, for the attitude, strategy and outcomes so far. By engaging people in a social context, we can keep them coming back with each release and create own our own traffic streams and marketing channels outside of Google and search engines. WHAT DOES DESIGNING FOR SOCIAL MEAN?   PODIUM Version 1 with Facebook given equal weight as a web article   We had a clear strategy to leverage Social from Day One 1. Only the best goes online I chose to put less online. Only the best articles, and pieces we thought would spark debate, made it online. This means we didn't water down the user experience – readers only get the good stuff. Where Search would say "Stick everything online and pray for longtail" I believe the mantra for Social is "Don't bore me. Blow me away!". 2. Twitter is for the Insider's View Twitter would be owned by the Print Editor, (Andy @sportingpodium). This means we have a highly knowledgeable sporting writer who is able to engage online with the people we cover. When you cover Usain Bolt and your writers are guys like F1's David croft, getting them to retweet your coverage of them IS your Twitter strategy. This is a virtuous circle of promotion, everybody taking part wins. Build this into your products and you have a marketing beast. 3. Facebook is for Debate For Facebook, we decided to pick the most contentious article each edition and put it behind a like wall on Facebook. The article would sit on the site homepage, looking like an article, but when clicked on, would take people to the Facebook page. Our hope is that people will debate these articles on our Facebook page, thereby taking advantage of Facebook Edgerank, to make these articles pop up into everyone's feeds. 4. It's all one product concept = better use of time and energy This meant we could cut down our energy expenditure on where we were trying to funnel people. Instead of diluting our energy trying to get people to Facebook, Twitter and the Website, we focus on the website and allow the strategy and mechanisms built into our use of Twitter and Facebook to naturally accrue users on those platforms.   WHAT WE LEARNT   PODIUM Version 2 with Twitter and Facebook taking pride of place 5. Do more of what is successful By the time we got round to Version 2, we found that Twitter was a steady audience builder. We wanted to promote Twitter in the same way as Facebook. We didn't do that by slapping a Twitter button onto the webpage. In the new design, we made Twitter and a Facebook a living part of the website. Social is not an afterthought, the website is now a Social Content Delivery Mechanic. 6. Not everything succeeds Facebook is hard for us and we haven't cracked creating the conversation there yet. This is partly due to the exciting rigours of turning print writers into digital writers. But each success that we do make, in traffic spikes and twitter followers, builds a stronger and stronger internal business case to pursue this route with other titles. 7. Jump on every opportunity This means monitor your Analytics daily! We need to turn every scrap of attention into engagement. To do this you need to react quickly.     The debate piece The first spike was a forum that had picked up our F1 piece, which certainly provoked some controversy. I read their discussion and realised I could add something to it, so joined the forum and posted. This engagement kept the debate going, drove more traffic to the site and means we can go back in future and promote other F1 stories. Note: I posted openly and clearly as Podium, clarifying a point without appearing spammy.   The Wow! Piece I saw this traffic spike in the Analytics and tracked it back to the artist's Dribbble page. He had created a Pixorama for us to illustrate a story and linked to us from his Dribble account to say it was going to be in the Magazine shortly This was not going to appear online but when I saw it and the traffic it was generating to our site from Dribbble, I knew it had to go on the site. I'm sure it is going to turn into awesome linkbait.  8. Partnerships = Win This comes in two forms Firstly, competitions for partners help us drive traffic but also allow us to make connection with brands in a scenario in which our first interaction is that we help them Secondly, as we write our own, exclusive content with major stars, we can share some of it with another website. They will send traffic and link to us to read the full article. Sharing your unique content is something that would be hard to do if you had your SEO hat on, but in the social world, its fine. As long as you have mechanisms set up to capture that visiting traffic on Facebook and Twitter, you are building your long term marketing channel.  9. Tools help We learnt what generated buzz and discussion and tried to work that into our future thinking. F1 has a crazy community! A tool like Followerwonk would be heresy to traditional print journalists as a means for deciding who is newsworthy, but it can now become part of our process in choosing who to cover, and who to talk to about specific sporting articles.    Followerwonk allows you to see the most influential people who have a keyword in their bios.   IN CONCLUSION   We still have a ton to do. But we have great, unique content at our disposal and real subject matter experts to create our conversations. Long term, I am sure (and relieved) that the traffic we have seen and the community we are building will be a much better investment of our time and scarce resources than pure SEO. Do you like this post? Yes No

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