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Google AdSense and Optimizing Your Context

The ability to have a sort of Google AdWords on your own site through its AdSense program and collect revenue from clickthroughs seems to me to be an exciting opportunity. Google seems to put quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that they consider context and not just keyword matching to determine which pages get matched with which AdSense sponsors - the better the content of the web page, the better quality sponsors that will be assigned to that web page. Apparently, the higher quality sponsors have higher payout amounts for clickthroughs as well.

For the first time, to my knowledge, two revolutionary things are occurring here. The first is that good search engine optimization skills can translate DIRECTLY into revenue. (And the better the context that supports your key phrases, the more revenue earning potential you have.)

The second is that there is now a free method of getting a page crawled by Google immediately. By submitting a page to Google for approval in the AdSense program, it’ll get crawled in short order and at no extra cost to you. That's like Yahoo! saying they're not going to charge $299 anymore for inclusion and even pay you for submitting pages to them if they really like them.

Google adds sense to the Internet marketing industry
This program by Google is also encouraging people to create better content for the Internet. Website owners now have a direct financial interest and incentive to create better content. Anyone who understands contextual advertising and knows how to optimize their context has a serious competitive edge over others joining Google's AdSense program. If you can create information rich content with the right keywords and context, you can maximize the revenue you make in Google's AdSense program. That really puts the rich in "rich content" doesn’t it?

Contextual advertising is not new. It's been around for a long time. Google's major contribution in the contextual advertising space, as I see, is two-fold. The first is the delivery mechanism. Rather than pop-up ads which are intrusive and/or blocked by various browser plug-ins and add-ons users have installed, and rather than software which has to be downloaded and installed and may change the behavior of the user's computer, AdSense's ads become part of the content of the page and require no special or additional software. It is contextual advertising that avoids being intrusive and requires no extra effort on the part of the user.

The second contribution is intentional partnership for mutual benefit. Some contextual advertising programs and techniques are despised by many publishers because some third party is making money off of their content and they have no control over it and receive no revenue from it. With Google AdSense, a publisher voluntarily enters a partnership with Google wherein: (1) the placement of the ads is under the total control of the publisher, (2) even the content of the ads are under the direct influence of the publisher by means of the make up of the page’s content, and (3) the publisher shares in the revenue from the ads.

From the perspective of an advertiser and content provider, these features do indeed make a lot more sense than the alternative methods of contextual advertising.

Maximizing revenue in contextual advertising requires optimizing your context
Optimizing your context can be thought of in terms of a two-step process. I will just discuss internal page factors here, but your link strategy can be contextually optimized as well.

The first step is choosing the right keywords just as you would in any normal SEO campaign. The best place to start is at Wordtracker, which should be no surprise. Learn what are some of the more popular keywords and keyphrases when creating content from scratch to discover what subject areas may match the sponsors with the highest clickthrough payouts. You may also want to look into which words and phrases have the highest bids at pay-per-bid services to increase your chances of having ads matched to your content that have higher paying clickthrough rates.

The second step is supporting your keywords with the right secondary words. I'm not talking about simply keyword density (the number of additional words); I'm talking about semantic relevance (which additional words). In its overview page about the AdSense program, Google says, "We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages." You've got to include words in your content that are closely related to your keyphrases. You can perform this research manually in the following manner. Here are the terms in which you need to think when selecting words related to your keywords and keyphrases. (Excuse me while I wax linguistically for a moment.)

Linguistic relations: synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, meronyms, and holonyms.
Hypernyms – word(s) that are more generic than your keyword or keyphrases but topically related
Hyponyms – word(s) that are more specific than your keyword or keyphrases but topically related
Meronyms – word(s) that name a part of what your keyword or keyphrases signify (e.g. "brim" and "crown" are meronyms of "hat")
Holonyms – word(s) that name the whole of which your keyword or keyphrases are a part (e.g. "hat" is a holonym for "crown” and “brim")

Engine-specific Taxonomy relations: Taxonomies are a way to organize documents or web pages into logical groupings, based on their contents. Ideally, documents discussing the same subject will be grouped together into one of the taxonomy's categories.

For your target search engine (Google in our case), you need to find other web pages in your category – just do a search on your keyphrases and take note of what words and phrases are being used on those pages that clarify and expound upon the keyword(s) you've selected. You are learning what the search engine knows about the subject matter represented by the group of pages returned for your query. The deeper you go into the results pages (at least 30 links at a bare minimum), the more accurate you will be.

Once you know what the search engine knows, you'll need to know which of these words and phrases are more important than others so that you can know how to use them in your content. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do this by hand with any accuracy. If you're not averse to using your own educated guess as to their relative importance, this is your only alternative to making use of some pretty complicated mathematical equations. Create sentences and phrases in your content that use words and phrases from your support list.

Do you know how to semantically support your keyphrases? The folks at Wordtracker do. In the resources section of their website (http://www.wordtracker.com/resources/index.php?cat=14), they reference a new tool developed by yours truly with the following description, "You can have higher relevancy, better rankings and increased traffic if you build the perfect context to support your keyphrases." This new tool is called Theme Master(tm) (http://www.theme-master.com). The content on the second half of Theme Master's front page tells you all about how contextual analysis works. Theme Master does all the math for you if you don't want to do it on your own or don't want to guess about the importance of your secondary, supporting words for your context.