Selecting Adsense Keywords

It’s called Google Adsense. Adsense gives website publishers of all sizes the ability to display relevant Google ads on their content pages. Because the ads are relevant to your content your click through rates will be very high (You earn revenue as a publisher every time someone clicks on an ad on your page).

It works like this – Google actually READS the content on a website and places relevant ads based on that content.

Advertisers bid on keywords to have THEIR ad displayed on those pages. The advertiser only pays if someone clicks on their ad.

You need to be approved to be an Adsense Publisher – and to do that you need a website.

Your site should have the following features:
1.) Content
2.) Purpose
3.) Other advertising such as an affiliate program or opt in newsletter.

It’s important to have something on your site OTHER than just content. Google wants relevant GOOD sites – not sites just put up to earn money from Google.

That being said – after you are approved for your first site, you can display your Adsense Ads on your other sites as long as you abide by their guidelines. I suggest reading their terms of services but as a general rule you want to:

Not display Adsense Ads in pop-ups.    
Not force clicks on the Adsense Ads.
Not use Generated Pages (there are programs that will generate thousands of pages based on keywords, but they can often get your website banned).

There are several aspects of building a profitable Google Adsense Site. Mainly they are keyword selection, content and linking.

2. Keyword selection    This is probably the hardest thing when building an Adsense money making site. Best keywords are not the big ones, because it's hard to get your site listed high in the Search Engine Results. The best ones are the ones where there isn't much competition and you can get into top 10 quite easily.

You can use "ceiling fan" as an example of a good keyword. A top 5 site is making 1000 $/month with Adsense. On the other side, as a bad example, use "work at home" (or something like it). Make a small comparison between those two (with the same amount of work, you can make 1000$ with "ceiling fan" and let's say 100$ with "work at home"). Picking those “GREAT” keywords is probably what will separate you from making a few cents to making hundreds a day.

As you are starting out you probably don’t have a clue how to do this right – but you should start off by forgetting about keywords. I don’t mean totally, but instead of researching “keyword” instead try to research and optimize for a term instead such as, “Keyword phrase”.

The bid advertisers are paying for a term like “toys” is quite large – but your competition is very fierce. Something like “outside toys”, won’t have as high of a bid price, but you will get more traffic from the search engines.



2.1 So how do you go about selecting your keywords? Selecting and finding those keywords is the most important part of website development if your ultimate goal is to drive targeted search engine traffic to your site. I guarantee if you do not spend some time on this step you will fail in your marketing efforts. Your GOOD keywords are the basis on which all of your search engine traffic will come from. Since this is your site you may think you know what keywords and phrases people will use when searching for the information your site has. Most webmasters are usually quite off the mark in this regard.

As a matter of fact you probably don’t believe me. Do this, write down the top 5 keyword phrases that you think will bring your site traffic. Set this list aside and compare it with what you finally come up with after you go through the steps outlined below.

1.) Ask others – forums are great places to ask people questions like this. Affprogram.info, sitepoint.com, and many of the other popular marketing forums are great places to go. This is an important step because these are some “real” people that will be searching for what your website has to offer. After you get some keywords and phrases put them in a spreadsheet.

2. Expand Your Keywords into a List of Key Phrases Starting with the obvious keyword build your spreadsheet like this:
Fish
Fish Lures
Fish Lures sales
Fish Lures Sales Pennsylvania
Fish Lures Sales Pennsylvania United States

3. Go to WordTracker.com and take advantage of the free trial. After you are all signed up enter in your one word keyword. So we would enter in “fish”. When you actually do the search you are returned a list of keyword phrases. The first term is the same as the initial keyword you chose followed by a list of additional phrases.

4. Organize and plan the next steps. You have now built up a sizable list of keywords, phrases, and search terms. Compare your results with what your polling in step one gave you. The results you get from word tracker are fact. These are keywords that are actually used in real searches. Statistics don’t lie. Hopefully they would match what you wrote down but in reality they are probably much different. Five to ten keywords or phrases are probably all the workload you want to start off. If your new at this and try to do more you will probably end just confusing yourself.

5. Prioritize your terms There is a huge amount of competition for your primary keyword “search” but much less for the fifth through tenth ranked. Your word tracker results will tell you how popular each term is and how many searches are carried out for each keyword phrase. You should note that the amount of searches that word tracker lists doesn’t count Google. Google usually does about 8 to 10 times more than listed by wordtracker.

It’s unreasonable to expect to get top search position for any very popular search term as the competition is just too intense. It’s perfectly possible for the last term or one of the less popular terms and if you are serious about search engine traffic then you should be able to achieve good results for all of your other keyword phrases.

List your terms in REVERSE order and get to work making content. The reason we suggest doing them backwards is that you should get good results from the less searched for terms and this will give you the results you are hoping for.

Ah yes, I omitted to tell you that building traffic is a tedious and time consuming pastime, but hey! Someone’s got to do it!

6. Putting your keyword phrases to work This is the content generation part. It’s probably the next most important step. What do I mean by this? There are “hotspots” on your pages that search engines look for when they are indexing your pages.

These hotspots are the page title, the page description and the page heading. By incorporating your keyword phrase into these hotspots you are telling the search engine what your page is all about. You still need relevant content. One general rule is that you should write for people with search engines in mind.

7. Rinse, wash, and repeat for your other keyword phrases. Keep going through your keyword list and making new pages. Once you have 10 or so pages you are probably ready to go live.

2.2 Keyword Research Tools    
There are many tools available on the Internet to help with keyword research...
WordTracker - online keyword research tool with free trial version
Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool - free online tool
The Dowser - advanced free downloadable keyword research software
Goodkeywords - free downloadable keyword software

Learn More About Adsense Words in
The Beginners Guide To Adsense