Google AdSense AdSection Tag

For one or another reason we build a website, for passion, to share what we know with others or simply because we want to create a community with friends and make it popular so we can feed our ego. All goes fine, the site growing…and together with the site the cost to maintain that web sites grows as well.

Who has the funds to maintain and sponsor his own website continues that way, others usually end up turning their passion website into a bill pay website due to the high costs for the dedicated server or other reasons that start to hit our budget.

In the last few years the first step to make money online has been Google AdSense. It takes few minutes to sign up for AdSense, it requires just a javascript code to be placed in your website and thats it. In addition it gives you the freedom to change the look to better blend it with your site.

The earnings might differ from the niche of your website, for example the lawyer and real estate niche pays much more (reaches $1-$15 per click), while the music or online games niche pays way much less (around 2-3 cents per click). But what if we do not have a niche and we want to have a blog where we can talk for anything (web hosting, make money online, food, sports etc.) ? It is a problem that AdSense publishers often have to deal with in such kind of sites, even tho AdSense displays ads based on the content of our website, some times it gets off topic and doesn’t display ads related to our content (even tho this depends a lot also on the keyword density of the article), what can we do in that case?

Google AdSense program provides you with the AdSection Tag, tags with which you can wrap the keywords into and give more importance so that we get more ads related to our content which will help your click through rate to increase. With the AdSection Tag we can also determine which words we want Google AdSense to ignore (and not to display ads related to that word).

Lets have a look how the adsection tag works. In this article I am writing about Google AdSense and make money online, hence I would rather see ads related to Google AdSense and make money online, by wrapping these phrases with the ad section tag like this

<!– google_ad_section_start –>Google AdSense<!– google_ad_section_end –> and <!– google_ad_section_start –>make money online<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Wrapping make money online and Google AdSense phrases with the adsection tag we give more weight to those keyword phrases and ask AdSense to display related ads to those keywords.

In this same article I have used the words web hosting, food, sports, if I wanted to tell the AdSense program that I do not want ads related to those keywords because this article is NOT about food or sports or web hosting I would simply wrap those words within the adsection ignore tag like this

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>web hosting, food, sports<!– google_ad_section_end(weight=ignore) –> or each separately if they are not within the same phrase.

I wanted to see if the ad section tag works actually so I tested it for 2 months (since Google AdSense team gives no guarantees that it will work and because it takes up to 2 weeks before the AdSense crawler takes in consideration these changes, as stated here).

The Results
In the first month when I used the ad section tag and the ads were related to the topic I was writing about the click through rate increased. While on the month that I did not used ad section tag the ads were pretty much related (but not all the time) and the click through rate drastically decreased.

Even tho this is a seo optimization blog and not a make money online I am aware that someone might be interested into this (we all do need to make money from our website at one point, especially if we run a non-services website or blog). Another thing I would advice to those that wan’t to make money online from their website is not to stop only with AdSense but to explore new ways to make money online.

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