Well, I was giving this some thought today and came up with a good explanation for this. Now I don’t know if I am right but this is my theory anyway.
Google have a lot of successful advertisers on their Adwords PPC system. This is where they make a lot of and probably most of their multi-billion dollar income. Because of the system that Google run it pays to have a high click-through-rate (CTR). For anyone who doesn’t know, the more successful your Adwords ad the cheaper it becomes for the you.
Now what if these ads were being shown on sites that had the wrong target market or in other words the visitors to that site were not interested in clicking on the links and even less interested in buying the product on offer, it would play havoc with the CTR of the ads and the campaigns would become very expensive and discourage their paying customers.
Yes I know. You are going to tell me that the ads can not be on the wrong site because the Adsense system makes sure that the ads are relevant to the page they are on. True, at least in most cases, but they have different levels of ads and different levels of websites.
So the best ads are shown on the best sites. Now the obvious question is, how does a website become a quality site? That is easy to answer but it is not easy to build and maintain one. If it was everyone would be doing it.
I know that there are several Guru’s out there telling people that the secret to success in Adsense is to have a medium to low quality site. This would be a site that is optimised well enough to attract some traffic but bad enough that no one would want to stay there and would therefore click on the Adsense links on the page to leave the site as soon as they got there.
The trouble with this plan, of course is that you will only get the lowest quality and therefore lowest paying Adsense ads. This means that you would need massive amounts of traffic to make any money at all.
Ok, back to the original question. What constitutes a Quality web site in Google’s eyes? What kind of site do you like to use? A site that is informative, newsy, easy to navigate, content updated regularly and one that is easy on the eyes. Of course looking at it from Google’s perspective it would also be good to have lots of links from relevant quality sites like your own. On page optimisation is important. I have designed and build four websites in the travel industry they each have about a dozen inward links none of which have a PR of 4 and most of which are not ranked. And yet each of these is on the front page of Google for competitive search terms. None of these sites have Adsense on them. They are sites I built for clients and I manage the sites for them.
Even so, I am not suggesting that this is a good way of doing business. There seem to exceptions to most rules and some sites seem to slip between the cracks in some systems. That is always the case. It is always good to get inward links outward links to and from similar sites or at least sites with a similar theme so that your site will be seen by Google as being of service to your visitors by providing links to other sites with information on the subject. The inward links, of course are other sites doing the same thing and are seen by Google as acknowledgement that you have a site worth their visitor’s while visiting.
The trouble is that some people would prefer to copy your content to their site instead of linking to it. But that is another story.
So what’s the plan?
1. Decide on a topic for your web site. This should be a topic that has some meaning for you. If you do not care about the topic, it is unlikely that you are going to do much with the site in spite of all your good intentions. You must be able to provide your visitors with quality content and thereby climb the Search Engine Results Pages and get visitors. (Page Rank is less important)
2. Research. Research the subject and become an authority on it. Then find out which keywords are paying the most and use them frequently on your page, but don’t spam.
3. If you are not good at web design get someone else to do it. A professional job is usually best. But remember web designers are not always good at search engine optimisation (SEO). The ease of navigation and page layout is important to your site’s success.
4. When you have a good site up and running, start building links. It has been said recently that Google are not attaching as much importance to links (on-way or not) as they once did. Whether this is true or not, I would highly recommend that you still build links with other sites because every little helps. There are only ten sites on the first page of the search results. A one place drop could put your site on the second page. Also, you will get a substantial amount of quality traffic from these links if you chose your link partners and anchor text wisely.
5. Where you place your Adsense ads on the page is vital important to your success. If you are unsure and even if you are sure, I would strongly recommend Michael Cheney’s Adsense Videos. I bought them myself and they are well worth the small cost.
One more thing, optimise every web page separately. That means every page should have its own set of keywords, and its own title. This is important. Putting your url on the top of the page is of no use to you at all. We have all seen pages with no title or the same title on every page. This is a no no.
I’ve said enough for today. Comments welcome. If you think I am right or wrong about something let me know.
And the Irish drink as much of it as all the rest put together.