Optimizing your Blogger template

Inside AdSense, the official blog of Google Adsense has a very good article on optimizing AdSense on blogs. Read about it here. I religiously followed their suggestions and saw significant increase on my blog money. But still, I'm not satisfied with the result that I continued experimenting. You'll notice that my ad positioning now is quite different from their suggestion on that article. After wrapping around the blog post to the ads, I see a significant 50% increase on my average blog money per day. So far, this positioning is the best for me. But I'm not yet done. If I can still think of a better ad position, I might test it again next week.

The challenge of putting Google AdSense on Blogspot blog is the Adsense maximum ad placement of 3 ad units, 1 link unit, 2 Google search box and 4 referral button (1 per product) on each page. This is the first challenge that I have to face when I started my blogtimization. The article on Inside AdSense shows proper positioning, but how to do it exactly on Blogger was never mentioned.

My initial thoughts were these: If I am going to put an ad after each post as a "commercial break", and I limit the post display to 2 on the main page, it's fine on the main page but what will happen to the archive page? Surely, I will have one ad per post, and if I have 10 post in a month, that will be 10 ads in a single archive page! It's a sure violation of Google Adsense policies. Then, what if I remove the archive page? For me, a blog without the archive page is not a blog.

Well, I was able to sort things out after searching the Blogger help. I found three Blogger tags that solved my problem. These are the MainPage, ArchivePage and ItemPage tags. What do these tags do? Blogger call them as conditional tags. Read all about them here.

Using these tags, I was able to manipulate how ads display on each item page, archive page and main page. You can check this blog, or my text messages blog and you will see that I display ads differently on the Main Page, Item Page and Archive Page. But still, I stick with their policy on the maximum number of ads per page.

If you are serious on putting ads on your blog, start learning these tags so that you can blogtimize your template the way you want it.

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Now, as promised, I'm giving away free blogtimized Blogger templates. I'm going to share with you my templates I used on this blog and on textmates. You are free to edit the templates in anyway you want. I just want one favor in return for this free template. Simple and easy, just write one blog post in your blog about this blog. Say anything you want, it doesn't matter, as long as you have a post in your blog with a link to this blog. Then, send me an e-mail at marhgil(at)yahoo(dot)com stating your name and the link to the blog post. And a bonus, if you link my four blogs (kukote in a jar, textmates, kukote meets the beauties and this blog) on your sidebar, I will give you a copy of "SEO Made Easy" pdf file from which I learned much of the SEO practices that I applied on my blogs. I'll send the templates at least once a week depending on the number of requests. Deal or no deal?

Let's blogtimize to blognetize!