Keyword Optimization for Google AdSense
- What is Keyword Optimization?
- Keyword Density
- Keyword Placement
- Stop Words
- What's Next
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The AdSense for content program analyzes web pages to select relevant advertisements from the pool of AdWords ads that can be displayed on third-party sites. Although the algorithms used by Google to do this are sophisticated and patent-pending, with the details and related patents now public, ultimately it all boils down to one concept: keyword determination.
Google's crawlers are not intelligent in the human sense; they can't "read" a web page and understand its meaning. What they can do is look for clues in the page itself and its surrounding context—such as which other pages link to it—to determine what the page is about and to come up with a set of keywords that accurately represents the content of the page. This is where keyword optimization becomes important.
What is Keyword Optimization?
Keyword optimization is the process of fine-tuning a web page to raise the prominence of specific keywords. For AdSense publishers, keyword optimization ensures that the AdSense crawlers select the most relevant advertisements for a page. The more relevant the advertisements, the higher the click-through rates on the ads. Keyword optimization can also be used to target page content at higher-paying advertisements.
Keyword optimization is not a new concept, of course; it existed long before the AdSense program was developed. In fact, keyword optimization is one of the primary techniques for search engine optimization (SEO), the science (although some call it a black art) of improving a page's search engine rankings. The techniques described in this article apply equally well to either use of keyword optimization.