Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Tweaking the description meta tag

I attended the First Philippine Blogcon 2006 last Monday, September 25, 2006. It was a blast. It inspired me to continue what I'm doing. You won't believe how much blog money these guys are making.

Marc Macalua, the SEO expert gave us some tips on on-page optimization. One of his tips is to make a unique meta tag description for each page. He showed us how to do it in Wordpress, but unfortunately, he doesn't know about blogspot. =( Since I'm quite familiar with blogspot or Blogger blogs, I studied it and came up with the following code:

<meta name="description" CONTENT="<Blogger><$BlogItemTitle$> | </Blogger><$BlogDescription$>">
<Meta name="keywords" CONTENT="put your keywords list here<Blogger>, <$BlogItemTitle$></Blogger>">

Insert this code inside the <Head></Head> tag. This code will insert the title of your blog posts to the meta tag description followed by your blog description. It will also optimize the keyword tag, putting your blog post title after your keyword lists.

On other matters, I found out that most of them are also earning from Text Link Ads, so, I signed-up too. You can place your Text Link Ads advertisement on the same page with Google Adsense, since Text Link Ads are not contextual.

That's all for now. Happy blogtimizing!

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Thursday, September 14, 2006

Get the most out of those clicks

I tried using the Competitive Ad Filter feature of Google Adsense and my earnings per day tripled overnight! I still get the same number of clicks, but the amount I get per click increased 3x!

What I did was to block those low paying advertisements. Which advertisements are these? If you see advertisement that says, "Here are the top sites on..." or "We've got the chosen sites on...", block them on your account by using the Competitive Ad Filter. You just need to specify their website address.

These sites are Made For Adsense (MFA) sites. If you visit their site (don't click on your ads, ok? It's a violation of the TOS!) by typing directly the website address on your browser's address bar, you will notice that what they got are trash information and a couple of Google Adsense ads. These sites will not invest that much on a single click. Most likely, they just pay $0.01 to $0.03 per click. So, why let them advertise on your site? Block them so that only those high paying advertisers with quality content will appear on your site. You'll notice a dramatic change on your Adsense earnings. With the same number of clicks, you can double, triple, or even quadruple your earnings overnight!

Check my blogs and you will not see these sites appearing on my ads anymore. And everytime I see such kind of advertisement, I simply block them. Google Adsense allows you to block 200 URLs. I think that's more than enough to block these MFA sites.

For more information on using the Competitive Ad Filter, read this. Please note that changes will not take effect immediately. According to Google Adsense help..."It usually takes about 4 hours for your changes to take effect, so you'll continue to see ads for these sites on your pages for a little while."

That's all folks!

Monday, September 04, 2006

Proper ad placement

For the past few days, I kept on experimenting on my Google Adsense placement. If you are not new here, you will notice that I removed the 160 x 600 Wide Skyscaper ad on my left sidebar. Instead, I used the 728 x 90 Leaderboard now, just below the Google Search box. I just found out that it performs better than the Wide Skyscraper. Maybe because it can be seen easily by the visitors, and it seems to be a part of the content and not an advertisement.

My link units perform the best of all the ad formats. I earned at least 70% of my Adsense income from these link units. I don't know why. =) Maybe because the visitors think it as part of the menu, so they click on them. Good.

As you can see, based on my experience, you can earn a "not that bad" amount of blog money if you blogtimize your blog. Proper ad placement can really make a difference. Now that I feel that my blogs are already blogtimized, the next step is to increase traffic. More traffic = more clicks possible = more blog money.

If you want to see how I properly coded my textmates blog, you can download its template here. You are free to use it anyway you want. You can study it or use it as your template.

That's all folks!

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