Posted in Internet Marketing Strategy	February 6, 2008

Defeating the "Google Gods" and hand-picking your own Adsense ads.

It’s not uncommon to come across an irrelevant ad on a blog or website that was hand-selected by Google. We’ve come across diaper ads on gardening sites, scientology ads on baby sites, and flower ads on industrial sites.

The key to relevant ads is what’s in your content. Since Google only reads text, anything in flash, graphics, etc. is not part of your content. If you’re looking to have the most optimized ads, your primary focus should be on your Title, URL, and Headline (contained in an h1 tag).

According to Joel Comm’s book, The AdSense Code, “The most important place on your website [for keywords] is directly beneath the AdSense box.”

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However, Comm also suggests “Section Targeting”. He describes “Section Targeting” as best for sites that cover a diverse range of topics. If you have a blog that covers politics, recipes, electronics, etc., this would be ideal. He also considers it useful for ignoring user comments if you’d prefer that ads stay focused on the content.

According to his book, by adding a couple of lines of HTML code into your Web page, you can tell the crawler which parts of your site are the most important. This will ensure that the ads are relevant to your site.

Here are the lines to wrap around relevant text:

<!—google_ad_section_start—>

Section Text

<!—google_ad_section_end—>

In the same fashion, if you want crawlers to ignore a section, insert this code:

<!—google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) —>

Section Text

<!—google_ad_section_end—>

Comm advises against highlighting only keywords, because it can cause you to be banned by Google. It will also have the opposite effect you desire by giving you unrelated keywords and will result in more frequent public service announcements.