I don’t think there’s really a way for me to overstate how much I love the Internet. Not just because it’s given me a great job or because it let’s me talk to friends and family members around the world, no … I love the Internet because it let’s me witness this type of stuff.

Now, if you didn’t guess the young lady in this video is over Justin Bieber but that’s not why I love it. Why I love it is that because of this video, she’s a trending topic on Twitter with the hashtag #SlutneyDalton. The Bieber Army has spoken and Sydney Dalton is the enemy. Since posting this video to YouTube, she’s been called just about every name you could imagine (and a few you wouldn’t imagine) but my absolute favourite is the threats posted to YouTube with almost 10,000 views (and she’s not happy).

Yes folks, she’s going to hit Sydney in the “@#$@#$ face with a full wine bottle, cork and all”.

Let me make this clear, I don’t care about the Beliebers but I do think this is a great example of how awesome the Internet is and I hope that somewhere out there, LonelyGirl15 is watching.

An easy way to think of it is this:

You have a page with a PageRank of 2 and you have 10 links on that page, each link has a value of .2 PageRank to vote for the authority of other websites. However, you have another page with a PageRank of 3 and you vote for the same pages on that page. Google only counts the higher of the two values (.3) when calculating PageRank, therefore there was a cost (you spent PageRank) on the first page but did not transfer a value.

First, you’ll need to have WordPress installed somewhere. I recommend Bluehost because they’re awesome but you can host it almost anywhere.

Next, you’ll need to understand basic custom fields in the WordPress posts. You can do this one of two ways, either take the time to figure them out or download the More Fields plugin and create a standard template. You’ll need to have a price for your items at the very least, maybe more depending on what you’re doing.

Next, you’ll need to have some code on your WordPress pages that make it connect to a PayPal account.

This is the code that I use on http://regentware.com to encourage people to donate. It’s fairly straight forward but we’ll go through it quickly.

$price = get_post_meta($post->ID, "price", true);

if ($price > 0) {
echo "
<form id="payPalForm" action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post">

<input name="item_number" type="hidden" value="".$post->ID."" />
<input name="cmd" type="hidden" value="_xclick" />
<input name="business" type="hidden" value="". get_bloginfo(" />
<input name="currency_code" type="hidden" value="USD" />
<input id="item_name" name="item_name" type="hidden" value="".get_the_title()."" />
<input id="amount" name="amount" type="hidden" value="$price" />
			";
echo "<input class="button name=" type="submit" value="Buy" /></form>

";
}

The code fetches the value of a custom field named price and if it’s found adds a form to the webpage which includes a Buy button, linking to the PayPal account of the website owner.

Using this simple script it’s possible to add a donate or buy button to any post, or with a little extra work you can quickly add weight and dimensions to use PayPal’s built it shipping calculators.

That means that for every link you give away, you’re spending your PageRank to do it! So if you’re going to link to other websites, make sure you mean it. There is however a way to link to other websites without spending your PageRank and that’s by using the nofollow attribute in your hyperlink.

<a title="My link" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.thisismyurl.com">Link Text</a>

By using the nofollow attribute you’re telling Google to ignore the link when calculating your PageRank, as well as the PageRank of the target website.

Law firms, like everybody else need organic marketing (traffic that comes naturally, without paying for it) and that’s why images are so important. Organic marketing from images is easy if you use proper descriptive ALT tags, names and file names. The reason it’s valuable for lawyers is because many people search the web for specific legal terms, creating images and graphs on your website to demonstrate your capacity to meet those needs is both visually helpful and will result in more traffic.

Use Social Media for Your Law Firm

Law firms are in the unique position to give professional advice for free which will benefit large groups of people but because the opinion of a lawyer is respected in the community, these posts can quickly become viral via social media tools.

Video’s Work

Forget what you know about blogging because videos work far better than everything you’ve read so far. People (myself included) love videos, they are more animated than simple text and deliver a message with more emotions. Videos drive traffic to websites and help generate leads, in the case of a law firm simply creating an air of trust with prospective clients would be enough reason to feature a video on your website.

Buying Links

Simply put, don’t do it. Buying links is huge breach of Google’s guidelines.

Duplicate Content

With all websites, you need to be careful that your content is unique and no where is this more true than on a legal website, major search engines are inundated with competitive keyword spam for the legal professions.

Make sure your content is fresh and unique, try to remember that Google is looking for great content and not content crammed with keywords.

I kid you not. According to Alexa, which is a website statistics company my website compared with the overall internet population, the site’s audience tends to be users who browse from home; it also appeals more to childless men earning less than $30,000.

Some of your may find that disturbing but actually it’s great to know because knowledge is power and with knowledge your ability to market your company increases dramatically. The statistics tell me a lot of other things too, such as I have bounce rate of 70%. I could see this in Google as well, that means that people who come to my site read one thing and leave. That’s bad, which means that I need to improve some things on my site. For example, since reading that fact, I’ve:

• changed the homepage from showing my most recent post to showing a list of recent posts so people can see more content;
• added a list of related posts on the bottom of each article to encourage readers to spend more time browsing and;
• I’ve added a list of popular posts to the right side of my website, to help encourage users to find more content on my site.

Regardless of the things that I do here on thisismyurl.com to promote content, what this website is really about is helping readers like yourself build better websites and that’s why using Alexa to find information about your websites is so important, take the time to understand what people are searching for on your site and improve their means to reaching it, that’s what running a successful website is all about.

I’d love to hear your opinion, what things could I improve on the site?

Pick (and Stick With) a Domain Name

There’s a difference between www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com as far as search engines are concerned, so pick one and stay with it. You can set a redirect in your header or by using a .htaccess file to force one over the other. It doesn’t really matter which you use but you need to pick and stick to one.

Link to Files Consistently

It’s important that you always link to files the same way on your own website (and offsite for that matter). For example if your website is at www.yourdomain.com then always link to that domain, never yourdomain.com and never www.yourdomain.com/index.php. If you do, you’re splitting your link value between two (or three) webpages.

Frames will Kill You

In the old days, before common sense and digital watches people used to use frames to display content, thinking that menus should be stored in their own frame. This ensured menus would never update but also meant that major search engines would ignore your content.

SEO Friendly URL’s

There’s a term used in the industry to describe some URL’s as Search Engine Friendly, according to Matt Cutt’s of Google, they really don’t matter much to Google but they’re still pretty. It also doesn’t matter if your document has a .html, .htm etc as the ending.

Getting Your Site Indexed

You can get a website listed with search engines in a few different manners, one of which is to add it to Google Webmaster Tools, which will help Google understand the content of your website faster.

Add Fresh Content Regularly

This can’t be stressed enough, it’s vital for spiders to see fresh content on your website. A blog is really helpful for this, ideally a website will have two or three fresh articles each week.

Not all Links are Created Equally

In a recent post called How to Improve Your PageRank you found out about the different types of link authority, measured in PageRank. This is vital to understanding how to improve your website SEO value. Try to get a few great links instead of a lot of poor links.

Avoid Keyword Stuffing

Sometimes when content is written for the web, writers try to stuff keywords into the text in hopes of increasing search engine results but it doesn’t work. Technically it might work for a while but then it’ll backfire. Always keep in mind that the people who work at major search engines are brilliantly smart and they’re trying to make sure their search engine results return the best results possible. If they catch you cheating by stuffing keywords into an article, they’ll punish you by taking you out of the results.

If you’re ever curious how they’d catch you, remember that language is basically a formula made up of words and those words have a natural order of verbs, adjectives, nouns etc. How hard do you think it would really be for the wiz kids at Google to scan a site for a formula that didn’t add up?

Write Relevant Content

We already spoke about making your links use keywords instead of text such as click here but build on that and ensure the paragraph your link is in is also relevant. Search engines are looking at links but they’re also measuring the proximity to other words. That’s why a search for roman spears doesn’t return results for Britney so choose your text wisely and consider how to best associate words.

Your Server

There are rumours about shared servers, specifically that being on a shared hosting server with a banned or blacklisted website can hurt your own ranking, it’s rubbish. There’s an article from Matt Cutts about shared servers which speaks specifically to this issue. Now, on the other hand if your server is unreliable (slow, offline etc) that will have distinct impact on your SEO rankings.

Helping websites build organic traffic is just one of the things that I do for a living, if your business needs to learn how to increase your SEO value or simply wants to hire a consultant to do the work for you, feel free to contact me.

What is Deep Linking?

First off, let’s set up what deep linking is. It’s simply the process of linking to content deep within your own website, that’s really all that it’s about and if you stop to think about it you’ll realize that it makes perfect sense as to why it’s a great SEO technique.

Why is Deep Linking Great for SEO?

Earlier in this article, I mentioned an article I wrote called Search Engine Optimization Tip – Deep Linking, it was written a few weeks back and is no longer listed on my homepage. You can still find it through Google and in my archives but it’s not a prominent article any longer which is too bad because it’s a great article on the value of deep linking.

The reason I linked to it is two fold:

• First, I believe it’s a valuable article which will improve the knowledge of some readers;
• Second, by linking to it I’m helping Google to better understand that the article has value;

Another key way to think about the value of deep linking is by considering that Google values content based on a series of data including PageRank. Since we know that PageRank is calculated by the value of pages and sites linking to an article, it stands to reason that the most valuable pages on a website would be linked to not only from other websites but also from the website itself.

In effect, the reason deep linking is good for SEO is simply that content you link to has value (otherwise you would not link to it) and therefore, good content is content that you’ve linked to.

What you should learn about SEO from this simple article is that SEO is about helping Google to understand what content is good on your website, not about tricking Google into linking to your webpages, so it stands to reason that if your website content is good, you should be willing to link to it in an organic method such as the way I did with the article above … not because I want Google to index it higher for SEO reasons but because Google should index it higher because it helps people understand SEO.

In fact, it’s actually more than that. It comes down to why you comment on a website at all, recently I divulged to a reader that my comments dropped from ~50 comments a day to ~3 a week when I turned nofollow back on here at thisismyurl.com. What does that tell you? It tells me that around 247 of the 250 comments a week I was receiving had nothing valuable to add to the conversation and instead participated in the comments to get a back link to their website.

Funny thing is, since I turned the nofollow attribute back on they’ve stopped commenting which is just silly because they missed the point of leaving a comment on a blog. For example, I comment on blogs all over the world when I have something to add to the conversation regardless of their policy on follow vs. nofollow and while those that follow add to my PageRank, they rarely drive traffic to my site. On the other hand, those with nofollow tags often drive traffic to my site.

The conclusion?

I get more traffic (and therefore marketing value) from websites with nofollow tags than I do from websites that add to my PageRank. Why? I think it’s correlative, first people don’t flood nofollow sites with pointless comments and therefore, people read the comments on nofollow sites more often because the comments on those sites tend to be more valuable and expand on the content.

You have no control over who links to you.

Major search engines are fully aware that you can’t control who links to your website, they’re not stupid. In fact, I would venture to guess that the big three search engines use some of the smartest people on the planet so it stands to reason that they’re aware of this simple fact.

All links are not created equal

There are however good links and bad links, some can help your website, some have no value for your website and some might actually hurt your website.

Good Links

• Links from sites in your industry. These links are helpful because they associate not only Pagerank but also subject to your blog.
• Links without a nofollow tag. These links transfer Pagerank values from a website to yours and increase your relevance to Google.
• Organic links. Links contained within text such as paragraphs have great value.
• Links from high ranked sites. The better ranking a website has or the more popular it is, the better for your website. (Get a free PR7 link)
• Links from low ranked sites. Websites with a low PageRank are still valuable, it just takes more of them to impact your ranking.

Neutral Links

• Links with a nofollow tag. A nofollow tag tells Google not to pass PageRank, essentially that the link is there but without value.
• Links from blacklisted websites. These are sites banned or blacklisted by Google (malware, etc) that Google refuses to rank or index, since they’re not indexed they’re not included in the rankings.

Bad Links

• Paid links. Anytime a link costs you money, Google will penalize you for purchasing the link.
• Non-organic text. Random words that are thrown together to create word clusters (i.e. tag clouds) look like SPAM to search engines.

Your website should make you money.

If your website costs you money, you’re doing it wrong. That’s about as basic as I can make that statement, you should not be spending money on your website which is one of the reasons that WordPress is such a great tool for business, because it’s free.

You can download WordPress for free from wordpress.org and get started today, there are no costs and in fact, there are no limitations. If you want to download and change it, then redistribute it as a new product you can. Or, more practically if you want to download and monkey with the code to make it perfect, you can.

So, right out of the box (or in this case a ZIP file) WordPress delivers tens of thousands of hours of development time for free, a savings of somewhere in the area of a half million dollars and five years development time (assuming there’s around 10,000 hours invested). More to the point however, you will never pay a licensing fee and because the WordPress development community (a global village of thousands of programmers) is vast, core errors are fixed for free.

Costs of hosting.

Also free. Well, pretty much free. If you have an internet connection at your office, you can put WordPress on any linux operating system (also free) and run it off a spare computer in the office. If you’re on a real shoe string of a budget you can even run it as a background task on most Windows or Mac office computers but personally, I’d splurge and spend $100 a year at Bluehost to run the site on a proper platform.

Costs of development.

There’s a philosophy that comes with open source development, while we’re all out to put food on the table, the community around WordPress pulls together to help write each others applications and improve code. That means that instead of competing with each other, most developers help each other improve not only the WordPress core but also plugins (they’re like apps for your iPhone) and themes. In fact, there are thousands of free themes and plugins you can download.

When you do need to hire a developer to do something fancy with WordPress, there’s a great community to choose from. Personally, I do a lot of custom theme and plugin work if you’re ever looking for a consultant.

As a designer, I’ve built websites for universities and as an adult student I’ve searched for university information so I’m confident that I have a fairly unique perspective on this marketing graphic and can tell you that it’s disturbingly true, or at least my experience has taught me that it is but what if I’m wrong? Let’s run a quick test to see how six universities in Fredericton stack up:

So what’s the result? Well, at first glance it seems that universities, much like most online businesses do a fantastic job of telling the consumer exactly what the company wants to tell them instead of looking at the usage analytics of a website to determine what the consumer really wants.

What do people want to find on a university website?

Ignoring for a moment the graphic above, the question becomes what do people really want on a university website or another way to ask the question is what are people searching for organically? Compete.com is able to answer that question for us with clarity.

Let’s play a little game here (no cheating) … according to compete.com what is the top search term for the University of New Brunswick?

1. university fredericton
2. t distribution table
3. university of new brunswick bookstore
4. school canada
5. unb

You’d be right if you guessed t distribution table, which is both a little disturbing and unusual which lead me to review the same site at Alexa and that returned a slightly more realistic list of top keywords:

Interestingly … last month 1,830,000 people searched for the word qwerty on Google, just something to think about.

Here are the six schools home pages for visual reference:

Don’t use them! JavaScript menus are yesterdays technology but that’s not the point. What is the point is that major search engines can’t see the links in them which means that search engines can’t follow them!

Content is What Matters

Stop thinking like a restaurant owner and start thinking like a tourist or casual diner in your community. They don’t search for salmon bisque or specific chefs, what they do search for are keywords like [your city] business lunches or [neighbourhood] dining so make sure your website reflects those key phrases!

Links Matter More Than You Think

Getting links from other websites to your website is critical for SEO, so when you buy an ad in a local newspaper request they link an online ad back to your site for free. Getting a review? Tell them you include a link to your site and them call all the local business groups or send an email to the national dining websites to generate as many backlinks as possible.

Don’t stop with external links though, follow a practise of deep linking which means that you want to link from page to page in your own website. Make sure that the content on each page links to related content on other pages, aim for a dozen or so content links per page.

PageRank Matters but it’s Not Everything

Where you rank in a search result is affected more by the pages on your site than your PageRank. Yes it matters but it’s just an ingredient in the ranking recipe, so don’t obsess about it. What does matter is links and great ones.

Flash is Fancy but it Fails SEO Tests

We all love Flash designs, they’re flashy like the Music Man and of course restaurants love it because it can create a mood but as for SEO value? There’s none so unless your business is big enough that you’re outspending your competition on advertising, avoid Flash.

Titles, Heading and Structure Matter

When you build a page, make sure your title (the part of the page that appears as the document name in your browser) describes what you want it to promote. This is key, titles are gold for SEO and they should be different on every page of your site. The same goes for the headers (H1 tags) in your content, for SEO it’s vital that your titles and headers are well written.

Freshness Matters

Much like your menu, a website needs to be kept fresh. Schedule an hour a week to update your restaurant’s website with things such as menu changes, employment listings, seasonal promotions, a message from the manager, pictures of happy customers. Remember, these add relevancy to your website for search engines by adding points of interest for visitors.

Avoid the Phrase “Click Here”

Often when we’re in a hurry, we type phrases such as To see our menu more, click here but that phrase holds no SEO value! Instead, try writing something like Our menu is online for you to read.

You Can’t Beat Everybody on the Web

The Internet is huge and you’re competing with thousands of restaurant owners, all as committed as you are to getting a better piece of the online market. Instead of competing for the keyword restaurant on search engines (which you’ll never get) focus your content instead on phrase such as [your community] restaurant or [your community] seafood.

ALT Tags & Titles

Ensure that every image on your website has proper ALT tags (alternative tags help blind people learn about your images) and title tags. These tags will help search engines understand your images as well as your content which can lead to dramatic increases in website traffic.

These are 10 simple SEO tips that I use on every restaurant website I design, if you’re looking for an SEO consultation for your website or would like to have one created, give me a call.

Google’s PageRank system is an often misunderstood system but if you’re going to try to make money online it’s vital that you understand it at a fairly basic level. So what is PageRank? The easiest way to explain it is that PageRank is a measurement of how much trust Google has in your website. The measurement is ranked from 0 (no trust) to 10 (absolute trust) with websites ranging everywhere in the middle, it goes without saying that most websites are ranked low with fewer and fewer websites making the grade for each increase in PageRank.

Why is PageRank Important?

At it’s core, PageRank is nothing more than a measurement of trust but this extends quickly into the realm of importance as a company attempts to improve their organic marketing position (the free links on search engines such as Google) because the more trusted your website, the closer to the top of Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) the website will be.

How to Get a High PageRank

If a high PageRank can influence your positioning on Google, it stands to reason that getting a higher PageRank is very important but in order to get a high PageRank it’s important to understand that the key to getting a high PageRank is getting links from websites which already have a high PageRank or, getting a lot of links from a lot of websites with reasonable PageRanks.

This makes sense if you think about it, Google wants to know that your website is valuable and the way it measures value is to determine how many websites link to your content, so in order for your website to be considered valuable (high PageRank), you must be viewed as an authority. For example if a website such the official White House (PageRank 10) website linked to you, Google would assume you must be worth linking to and if Apple (PageRank 9) linked to your website, Google would still assume that you must be worth linking to, or at the very least that the content on your website must be more valuable than if thisismyurl.com (PageRank 5) linked to you.

So then, to get a high PageRank you need to get websites to link to you.

Are all Links Created Equal?

No, all links are not created equal and in fact some are worth nothing at all because even though a high profile website such as the White House (PageRank 10) links to you, if they include a nofollow attribute in the link, it instructs Google to ignore the reference when calculating your PageRank. In that case, even though a link from the White House website would be beneficial to you and drive traffic to your website it would have no impact on your website’s PageRank.

This is an important consideration when trying to build links back to your website as many common forms of link building such as leaving messages on blogs, or generating ping backs will increase the number of links to your website but won’t increase your PageRank.

With that in mind, building successful links to your website is a vital step to creating a successful PageRank but building a successful PageRank is only one step in creating a successful website and it should be treated as a small fraction of a successful online marketing campaign.

Wave has taught us a lot, and we are proud of the team for the ways in which they have pushed the boundaries of computer science. We are excited about what they will develop next as we continue to create innovations with the potential to advance technology and the wider web. – GoogleBlog

That’s all great but really, who cares? In the end, Google Wave was as big a flop as the Microsoft Zune, it was on a scale comparable to Lindsay Lohan endorsed baby sitter clubs, actually scratch that because at least Lohan would have been able to get some great press about her latest endeavour. No, sadly Google Wave was simply a failure but not a complete waste of time as it’s taught not only Google but the rest of the world some valuable lessons.

First, if you want something to be successful it’s vital that your audience understands what it is. So what is it? According to the rather sparse promo page about it, Google Wave is a new web application for real-time communication and collaboration but wait, there’s more …

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Wait! They have video to explain it …

So, what is Google Wave? I have no idea and that’s rather scary because it was meant to change the world, actually it’s scary because it sort of reminds me of Microsoft’s .net promos in the days just after Y2K … I still have no idea what .net is (I don’t mean the programming language, I mean the integration solution). Lesson #1 then is simple, if you’re going to sell something please tell me what you’re selling.

The Users Site Map

First off, there is a site map designed for users of your websites. This is often found in the footer of your site and links to a page which summarizes all the pages of your website. It’s designed to be a simple document, sort of an index of the entire website which when viewed by Google can be used to access all areas of your website.

It’s important because without a site map, there may simply be pages which never get visited or even orphaned pages with no links from elsewhere on your website, so the site map provides both your user and Google with a simple, one stop site for the entire site structure.

Google’s Site Map

Beyond the site map created for the user, there is a unique file which can be added  to a website named sitemap.xml, it’s a dynamic data file which is designed to pass vital data about your site map directly to Google and other major search engines, you can see mine here.

The sitemap.xml file is a little like an RSS feed but it’s only designed for major search engines and it works in conjunction with Google Web Master Tools to help your website tell Google when a new post or page is added, as well as how often those posts and pages should be indexed. Here’s how it works:

1. you write a new post on your website;
2. your website automatically updates the sitemap.xml file;
3. your website notifies Google and other search engines of the new file;
4. search engines load your file and review the additions;
5. search engines add or remove pages based on the sitemap.xml changes;

To add a Google XML site map to your WordPress blog, simply download and install the plugin.

Knowing If Google’s Crawled Your Site

Using Google Web Master Tools it’s possible to see not only if Google is crawling your website but also when and how often, another great way to know when Google is indexing your website is to use Google Bot Bling, a free download for WordPress that’ll tell you each time Google indexes your website.

Simply put, a Tag Cloud is a collection of links to commonly ‘tagged’ items on your website. For example, this article has tagged several words such as Google and Matt Cutts, these tags help WordPress link articles of similar stories together and are designed to help improve the user experience on your site.

Matt Cutts posted a great video on YouTube this morning about Tag Clouds which answered this very question, actually it did a lot more than answer the basic question but you can watch the video first, then read some of the points taken away.

So Tag Clouds can either help, or hinder your SEO ranking depending on how you use them. Remember, Google will have less faith (or trust) in links that it believes are part of trying to trick it, which is what keyword stuffing would be. So if you want your Tag Cloud to help your Google Pagerank, here are some tips:

• keep your tags relevant;
• keep your tag list short;
• be aware that your tag list is displacing Pagerank;
• avoid Adobe Flash based tag clouds;

Remember, tag clouds are arbitrary words, stuffed together so be careful!

There has been a debate in the online community for years regarding which blogging platform is best for business to operate on, my simple inforgraphic here comes from an article promoting Drupal in which  D.C. Denison states:

According to Acquia’s research, WordPress is the choice of 54 percent of the websites that can be identified as using a content management system. Drupal’s share is 5.4 percent. – Acquia aims to make it easier to design websites

Happy blogging!

We can only control the type of content we write to a limited degree, after all my blog here is about online marketing and it would seem out-of-place for me to write about mortgages or medical insurance, regardless of the value of those keywords but what I can control is my Click Thru Rate (CTR) or at least I can influence it.

Why Getting a Better Click Thru Rate for Google AdSense Matters

Getting a better CTR for Google AdSense is critical if you want each click on your website to have a high value this is because Google uses a technology on their website to adjust the price of your ads if they feel your site is under performing. They call it SmartPricing but what it really does is lower your ad revenue based on their formulas.

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically reduces greatest cost-per-click (CPC) bids for certain pages in the Google Network across both desktop and mobile devices with full internet browsers.

Google is constantly analyzing data across the Google Network. If our data shows that a click from a Google Network page is less likely to turn into an actionable business result – such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter signup – we may reduce the bid for that site. – Google AdWords Support

The result for your blog is dramatic, two similar blogs that are running similar content can receive revenues 10 times less from being placed in SmartPricing. That means that your site could be losing 90% of its revenues, simply because your CTR is too low.

With that in mind, what we know about online advertising is that new visitors are more likely to buy from advertisers than established, loyal visitors and that Google uses not only CTR but also business results (such as an online sale, registration, phone call, or newsletter sign-up) to measure your cost-per-click value. So, what we need to do is remove Google AdSense ads from two categories of people:

1. Our Loyal Readers – these are readers who have us bookmarked and come to the site repeatedly, since they don’t click ads anyway they’re lowering your CTR
2. Readers of High Volume Articles – these are readers who come in on a DIGG or StumbleUpon article, they’re not likely to click ads and are also lowering your CTR

In fact, the only place we really want to show Google AdSense articles are on pages that are read less often but by new readers, such as those who find older content via search engines and that’s exactly who we’re going to target as our market.

The Code to Increasing Our Click Thru Rate and Ad Value on Google AdSense

What this code is going to do is place our Google AdSense ads on older articles (anything over 15 days), where users are coming from a search engine. At first it may seem counter intuitive to limit to such a small window of users but remember, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We’re using this code to exclude anybody who is unlikely to click our ads (loyal readers and readers of fresh content).

Now the piece of code that I’m about to post here isn’t mine, it’s from Cats Who Blog’s article 10 Tips To Finally Make Money With Google Adsense, all I’ve done here is combine two of their code samples into one and add an alternative to make sure that it works properly. To use the code below you’ll need to copy the two functions form Cats Who Blog into your functions.php file (Place Adsense ads on old posts only & Display Adsense to search engine visitors only) and add the code snippet below to your website (mine is in the sidebar) and you’ll automatically display Adsense ads only to people coming from search engines on posts older than 15 days.

php

if (scratch99_fromasearchengine() && is_old_post()) {

?>

// your adsense code here

php } else { ?>

// your non adsense code here
<?php } ?>