5 Tips to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR

We are always struggling to get a steady stream of traffic for our websites. However, when we finally achieve that goal, we may find that our nightmare continues, simply because a great amount of traffic doesn't necessarily follow that the traffic will translate into a high level of google adsense income. The CTR of our ads matters a lot, too. Here I'll list 5 small tips for you with regard to how your CTR will be improved.

• Set the color of hyperlink to be blue. Experience tells me that an ad link with blue color has on average the best performance. Maybe that's why Google , and Bing as well, adopts the blue color, too. If the blue color will greatly impact your overall color scheme, you can also consider red color, whose performance is also good.
• Avoid or limit the use of image ads. The CTR of image ads is really low. I guess the reason should be that the advertising is made so obvious that visitors are simply scared away.
• Cater to traffic generated by search engine. The reason that visitors use search engine is that they want to find something. After they find out what they want in a website, the next action is most likely to be closing the website completely. So you need to get the visitors to click your ads at the same time they retrieve information from your website. Otherwise, the chance is gone and you never know when they will come back, maybe never. Hence, you need to find a way to make your ads not only quite noticeable but also can arouse the visitors' interest. For example, use a large leaderboard, place the ads in between the title and the body, and so on. If the traffic from the search engine is taken good care of, I can assure you that the CTR is quite promising.
• Use borderless ad unit. This is quite self-explanatory. The borderless ad unit, coupled with the same background color to that of the webpage itself, can blur the distinctions between ads and site content, which creates the visitors' inclination to click your ads.
• Make good use of channels. Although it is quite effective, the channel is the most overlooked Google adsense tool by webmasters. In fact, through proper setting, you can easily identify which ads unit has better performance. In addition, you could judge whether changes in ad settings are effective or not. After several rounds of adjustments, you could arrive at the optimal ad placement and settings.

Needlessly to say, one can hardly exhaust the numerous ways to improve Google adsense performance. I hope the 5 tips elaborated above could cast some light for clever persons as you all to think of more applicable tips to make Google adsense more attractive to the whole webmaster world.

Google Plans to Include Website Speed In Its Ranking Algorithm

According to a recent blog post of Google engineers, Google was considering taking website speed into account when determining a website's ranking in its search engine. In this post, I'd like to go through this news together with you and see what it means to us webmasters.

Google's logic is, the higher the website's loading speed, the happier the visitor will be. Generally speaking, if the website takes a long time to load, the visitor would stay for a much shorter timer on that website. What's more, a faster website will not only enhance user experience but reduce the website's operational cost as well. Google has long been renowned for viewing user experience as its top priority. Including website speed in its search engine ranking algorithm will certainly provide a productive addition to its value proposition.

There is one question that we webmasters concern most - Does the inclusion of website speed will change a website's ranking greatly? The answer is, not really! As mentioned by the Google engineers in that post, too, the weight assigned to website speed is far less than that of the relatedness of the website to the search keyword. Therefore, the current ranking results, if not for other reason, won't change much. According to an estimate, only less than 10% of the ranking results might be affected by the change made in the ranking algorithm. In one word, we webmasters don't need to get panic at all.

To better cope with the change, we should understand how Google measures a certain website's loading speed. The method is quite straightforward. It can either check its famous crawler's responsiveness or check the tracking result retrieved through the Google toolbar.

Arriving here, we've got a better idea about why Google might consider the inclusion of website speed, what the change's impact is, and how Google checks the website speed. Although we can't know exactly the impact until after the change takes effect, it's always a good idea that we choose a faster web host instead of focusing on how much the host costs alone.

Second Thought On Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is always cited as one of the most effective ways to promote a website. For a long time, I didn't believe that. In my previous view, the chance of the comment being accepted is quite low. The fact that webmasters have the tendency to post their comments with the sole purpose of promotion rather than providing valuable insight make the acceptance rate even lower. So, personally I wouldn't want to spend my already precious time to do blog commenting.

My bias with regard to blog commenting is completely gone after I tried it once a couple of days ago. I downloaded a free software which could search and list all the blogs that allow one to post a do-follow link together with his or her comments. To be honest, I didn't take it quite serious as I didn't believe it could have any visible impact on my link popularity. So I just randomly picked a few blog posts and posted my comments to promote 2 Submit Article, and deleted the software after that. However, the result was completely out of my expectation. I checked my website's link popularity at the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard. It's quite astonishing to find that one comment I posted on a blog alone brought over 30 backlinks for my website, which constitutes a majority percentage of my total backlinks! Although the quality of those backlinks may not be quite high, the big number itself counts. Imagine you try to exchange links with other webmasters. According to my experience, out of 100 link requests, only around 10 of them will get responded, and unlike the multiplying effect of blog commenting, these 10 reponse will only be considered as 10 backlinks by Google. Therefore, blog commenting really worth a close examination.

After a thorough analysis of the blog which gave me such a large bulk of backlinks, I've summarized the following tips with regard to blog commenting to share with you so that we all can maximize the benefits from blog commenting.:

• The blog should allow commentators to post website URL along with the comment itself
• The website URL should be has do-follow attribute, or should NOT have the
  

  'rel="nofollow"' attribute

• Pick the blog that has "Recent Comments" section on the side bar. So, a recent comment will appear in every list or content page of the blog. This is what exactly contributes to the backlink multiplying effect.
• The comment is better to be closely related to the content of the blog post, so that the chance of being accepted by blog owners is higher.

As mentioned earlier, one big concern here is the quality of the backlinks. Since the backlink multiplying effect is largely determined by the "Recent Comments" section, you need to ensure that your comment will appear in this section. As the number of "Recent Comments" is limited, usually less than five, the less popular the blog is, and thus the less frequency of new comments, the more likely that your comment will appear in the "Recent Comments" section. However, it's the backlink from more popular blogs that has a much higher quality. Apparently, this is a dilemma for us webmasters, which returns to an old topic in the field of link building - webmasters need to balance between quantity and quality of backlinks.