Integrating Blogs and AdSense

• Adding AdSense To Your GooglePages
• Adding Blogs To Your GooglePages
• Adding Your Own Blog To Your WebSite
• Adding A Third-Party Blog To Your Website
• Adding Different Content To You WebSite
• Leveraging Feedburner

Adding AdSense To Your GooglePages

If you're a googlepages user and you want to add the adsense code to your page, goto the AdSense site and register for AdSense providing your site details. AdSense will generate your code. Then goto GooglePages, do an 'Edit HTML' on the page you want and drop in the code. You should see the Ads appearing once you publish.

Getting AdSense installed onto your page is the first step in what can be a mine-field of terms eCPM, CPC, CTR. Clicks is the one term which makes the most sense on first glance. To a certain extent you can treat Google AdSense as the SEO game. The rules are not immediately clear. Essentially AdSense is your friend but your first and most immediate concern is traffic. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important becuase it's what drives more traffic to your site. Once you get your SEO right, you'll want to get your Ads targeted. There are a few things you need to do to achieve this. One of these is to get your keyword density right and make sure the page ads are related correctly to your content. You'll need good content. Is there an area you're really interested in and your friends regard you as an expert on, then this is a good place to start. Get yourself a cheap domain and link it to your pages and get writing. The more you write the better. If you can include diagrams and photos all the better. Rich media sites are traffic drivers now that broadband is becoming cheaper and mainstream.

Cost-per-click (CPC) - The CPC is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords has a CPC pricing system.

Cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) � The CPM is the amount an advertiser pays each time a user views his/her ad and an impression is recorded. You can find a full definition of the terms here.

Next, one of the problems with any WebSite is that although you may start out with oodles of enthusiasm, just like that home house build that seemed to be a great idea, a couple of months later when there are over-runs and enthusiasm has flagged, you might want to move onto other things. This too can happen with your WebSite. So what gives? How can you keep it up-to-date without having to be continually tweaking it? The answer is to create a Blog in relation to the Web site. Then, a few times a week do some posts to your Blog and use some software to embed that Blog into your Website. Et Viola! You have a WebSite that's being kept up to date with not too much effort. Below this paragraph, you'll see my Blog is inserted into googlepages using the hack where one saves the page to the PC/your machine and you then upload and link to the uploaded page. You lose the editing facilities that googlepages offer but you get Javascript support.

In case you're wondering how I got the feed into HTML, I gave Feed Burner my Atom feed from my Blog and it gave me the Javascript to convert the feed into HTML. They call it BuzzBoost. It is also useful if you plan to do your own web hosting with another service provider. Note the Blog starts just after this article. You don't have any work to do if you post a new Blog. It's automatically updated!

One of the problems with the approach is that Google does not see the content on your syndicated pages, it only sees the Javascript calls. Therefore, Google thinks your site has virtually no content. You'll find your Ads are untargeted and the search engines is almost invisible. You can add new content to your ads but they won't change immediately. It can take well over a week so it makes sense that when you first create your page that you have as much content on it that you can and that it is targeted at a particular topic. If you, for example enjoy hobby build of planes, as I do, then mention model airplanes within your text. Adsense works on keyword densities so if you can help out Adsense, it will help you out. Do this at the outset and provide detail more than just skimming over the details.

If you want to know how popular or otherwise your page is, download the google toolbar. It has a gauge which shows the popularity of your page. If your page is new, then you'll barely register. You need what are called backlinks to your site and these are highly regarded by Google when it comes to ranking your page. Therefore we enter the realm of link swapping and a lot of people suddenly start talking about link spamming and so forth. This is why people create pages that contain your link and then ask you to link back to them. There's a bit of chicken and egg here; because Google values back links so highly, people want to be back-linked. It's a bit of a mine field out there. All I'd say is if people want to trade-links make sure they are related to your site in some way and not just link farms. Personally, I'd like to create a page of people who have Creative Writing as an example.

Next to the business of Ads. How many should you put on your page? There's no one strategy which is right but there are different approaches used by different people. A good way to find out what these is to look up something on Google and type in a search terms. Click on one of the top most links and take a look at Google's best. Do these pages have loads of Ads? In my case, I found this was _not_ the case. So, one approach is to build a wonderful page with content and easy-on-the-ads but maybe have one link at the bottom to some resource you'd recommed. My impression is the pages that are most respected and back-linked to are ones with great, great content. Some people exercise patience and build the content and rankings and then maybe will ad the ads later. Like I said, there's no one winning solution. Alternatively, you can create channels of content and build up each channel with a page a day.

If your pages are good and liked, people will eventually link to you. How can you tell? A great way to check this out if you have a WebSite with a front door such as www.yoursite.com, for example, is to sign up to del.icio.us - this is an URL by the way. When you add your WebSite to your bookmarks - you'll notice a very cool effect. It tell you how many others have the same link. This is really neat and almost like a straw poll. This is where Web 2.0 tools have a big win in my mind.

One of the other things you'll notice is that when Google crawls your site, it may not display every page in the search results. Personally, I call this the 'lazy load'. It's my term and I made it up. It's a bit like a guy in a room who's popular and has to meet everyone before the night is out. Imagine you're that guy. Everyone want to give you their business card and tell you everything there is to know about them and their business. Problem is you've only got a limited amount of time. Answer is, everyone gives you a pitch but you only take in twenty-percent or so and you move on. Google appears to do this. On the more important sites which are back-linked, the percentage is much higher. If you're a new kid on the block. you get new kid on the block time.

An immediate thought could be to find a community and create a page that links to all the other pages, thus you are on your way to improving your page ranking. Think again. What you are creating is a link farm and is frowned upon. Another approach is keyword stuffing or cloaking. Cloaking is an interesting one becuase it involves changing the content when the search engine searches the page. The problem is that although disapproved by Google, the were caught doing it too. The pages have since been changed. Once again, I return to the main point, fill your site with content that is related to you. Links farms are now detected by Google and marked down in terms of rankings. Keywod stuffing is exactly as it sounds. If your site is good, people will pay a return visit and recommend it and maybe even bookmark it. Below my Blog, I've added a feed from SEO Chat site and they discuss the latest happenings in the SEO world. It's a moving target.

Another tip is to register your site with google sitemap. This involved creating a sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz. You can google for this and it will bring you to the service. This is a really great service and shows you how your site is processed by the spiders. The search bots are called spiders. They crawl and index your pages based on your content. It's also possible to register your URL with other sites out there. I have found this to have limited use personally but you can do it. If you have budget, then you can hire an SEO company. Yes, there are SEO companies which make a living out of telling you how to improve your page rankings. Some individuals try to avert actually setting up a lot of content and instead duplicate what they have on different sites and do a lot of cross-linking. This should not be done. You'll get yourself banned by all the engines. It's also worth pointing out that one SEO strategy on one search engine may not guarantee success on another engine. For example, Google doesn't look at the meta tags while others do. So, what we're dealing with here is an inexact science. Instead of it being one board game, it's several SEO board games but one that must be played cleverly but ethically. I guess the hardest part of the game is to know the rules and hope they're not just hearsay and conjecture.

If you've a business and you want to get your shop online and being visited then it makes sense to engage in moving to the other side of the equation; namely signing up with Google AdSense or another click-through program and paying per click. For advertisers, this has been and is a highly effective way to generate revenue on their site. The chances are that the individual is interested in the product and there is a higher statistical probability that you could have a customer willing to shell out cash. You'll need to bid on a keyword which relates to your product. The google keyword tool is located in the left rail and there's an article on the economics of adopting this type of model. Essentially, you set aside an advertising budget and pay per click, with the expectation of a certain click-to-sale ratio. You might think, heck I'm not paying for that! But what is the alternative? Languishing with no traffic, unless you are an overnight success story. To do this, you'll need to create a service which has a sense of community characterized by means of a simple registration program and you'll have to make it free - so this is going to cost you. There's no getting around it unless you use other free tools which give you only limited customization and control.

One of the things I've noticed about GooglePages is that there seems to be very little visibility of ones GP WebSite on the Google service itself. It's not uncommon for member to get absolutely nothing to do with their WebSite. This may be the 'lazy load' effect. The Spiders may be only sampling a few of the site and not them all. This is merely conjecture on my part.

Now, back to setting up/bidding on your own keywords. As with all things in life, not all are created equal. The same is true for what you are bidding on. The Overture tool in the left rail can tell you how much you'll need to bid to gain traction on a particular keyword. This goes back to industry business models and might also explain why when someone does click on your AdSense page you get a fraction of a cent or a couple of them. If you'd like to know the kind of keywords you can bid on for your shop, I've added the keyword tool in the left rail. It's interesting to see the word interplay around items you can sell.

The very first you need to do is to get signed up to AdSense. You can do it within 24 hours and it's not just limited to the US. Remember, great content is king.

Adding Blogs To Your GooglePages

Another important topic which I bundle into this page is the usefulness of Blogs and how they open up new opportunities for you on your WebSite. One of the first thing many individuals do (and I include myself) is to let the person visiting your WebSite to know what is new or changed or cool. After a couple of weeks of making these updates, the list becomes longer and longer. The previous entries become less relevant and you're page is getting bigger. Put simply, the approach just doesn't scale. You start thinking about archives which you have to maintain and then you spend your time looking after this instead of adding content which is the essence of a good WebSite. So what gives? As with all things on the Internet, someone has hit the same problem as you and come up with a smart way to handle it. One way is to download some kind of scripting solution the other way is to setup a Blog, not just related to your WebSite but your thoughts on just about anything. Blogs are free and they are extremely cool and open up many publishing avenues to you which I'll go into in this article. At its simplest, it's your thoughts on a particular topic. We all have opinions on something so it's best to create more than one Blog; for example, it's probably not a good idea to combine a Blog about your love of plants and your dislike of a particular political party. Split them out and give them good and sensible names. The great thing about a Blog is - YOU are the BRAND. You're not espousing some software package; it's very much a case of Syndicate ME. So, back to the WebSite. What tools are out there? I've linked to more than one on the left rail. The one I am signed up to is www.blogspot.com which is great. I've two Blogs googlepagestheadventure.blogger.com and my more personal one about where I live and where I travel mbradyie.blogger.com. One big question is - why should I blog if I have a WebSite. What's the difference? Put simply, here's how I see it. If you want working examples of something, put them on your WebSite. If there's something current you're thinking about, put it in your Blog and refer to it. Now beware, there is a lot a bad publicity going on about people using their Blog as posting points for commercial products. The Blog needs to contain meaningful content and not be SPAM. There is an Honor Code at work here. Enough said.

Blogs are the most live content on the Web as you can imagine and they're text based for the most part so the search engines love them. It's up to you to establish the routine to update your Blog. In my mind, the trick in updating a Blog is a little like keeping a personal diary updated. Initially you might create a diary because you're steamed at someone and this is your way of venting. In the long run, that is not going to sustain your Blog or diary. What do you think about and talk about? Sometimes, you might talk a lot about work stuff but really be interested in furniture. It helps if the area is a 'live one'. If it's something that doesn't change or there are no trends to discuss, then more than likely you'll run out of steam. You might be surprised that niche areas are hugely popular. This is the place to discuss them. You might find there's someone in your area who has the same interests as you but you never knew.

In a recent Blog entry, I included a WashingtonPost link which showed that the growth on the Internet was mostly in Blogs and Wikis woul you believe. To a certain extent there is (in my opinion anyway) a paradigm shift going on. Many of the tools that were previously only available to 'big companies' are now available to us 'smaller folk' who want to participate meaningfully in this online community experience. (This is where I got the idea of Twigs. We're the new shoots on the Internet Tree. Yeah, cheesy I know :) ) Once you've setup your blog, one of the things you may want to do is integrate your blog into your web pages or setup a mailing list. I know, I know... some people may be reluctant to actually sign up becuase it could feel a little like spam - however, if you do want others to sign up to your Blog, here's _one way_ of doing this.

A GooglePages member asked me how to do this, so I guess there is interest...

Go into your Blog, in this case BlogSpot and get the RSS feed of your Blog.

Sign up to FeedBurner which is free and add your Feed

Goto the Publicize tab and use any of the options - in particular email

Add the generated code email code to your page

You'll see the result at the bottom of my home page

You can also use what FeedBurner calls BuzzBoost and this gives you script to embed in your pages and I use it through-out this WebSite for my own and third-party content.

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