Attracting Relevant Ads

Getting the color and placement right will help improve your click-through rate. But neither of those will affect which ads your site serves.

In theory, Google controls the ads that appear on your site. You don’t get to choose them at all. In practice, there are a few things that you can do to stop irrelevant ads from appearing and ensure that you get the ads that give you cash.

The more relevant the ads, the greater the chance that a user will click and you’ll earn money.

The most important factor is obviously going to be your content. Google’s crawlers will check your site and serve up ads based on the keywords and the content on your page.

Bear in mind that Google’s crawlers can’t read graphics or Flash or pretty much anything that isn’t text. I’ll talk about content in detail in Chapter 11 but for now, remember that if you want to keep your ads relevant, you’ve got to have the sort of page that Google can understand and use to give you the ads you want.