AdSense Tip #5: Manage your own AdSense account

My series of AdSense tips (the inspiration for my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google) continues with a tip about who should control an AdSense account. This tip comes directly from a conversation I had with someone who had been ripped off. Why were they ripped off? Because they weren't in control of their AdSense account.

I say should because the reality is that many people outsource the management of their sites third parties. Not everyone has the time or the expertise to develop their own Web pages (though it's not that's difficult to learn the basics, as I show in Make Easy Money with Google), so outsourcing the development and maintenance of a site may make sense in many cases. But don't outsource the management of your AdSense account or, worse yet, let someone else use their own account to display ads on your site. The AdSense account should be registered in your name (or the name of your business), not in anyone else's name. The money should be sent to you directly, as should the tax information. If you want to give the guys maintaining your site a cut of the revenue, fine, but do it yourself from the money that Google sends you, don't have the money sent to Google.

For similar reasons, make sure that the ownership and control of your domain name rests with you and not a third party. Your domain name (or domain names, it's common to have more than one, even if they just point to the same site) is a valuable resource, it's part of your brand. Take the time to learn how to use a domain name registrar (it's easy) and manage the names yourself. If you ever have problems with your hosting service, for example, you won't be held hostage by them (you do have local backup copies of your website, don't you?) if you control the domain name — there are plenty of web hosting companies out there eager for your business.

Google AdSense Tips

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again. We appreciate your patience. Sincerely, The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

How to Increase Traffic with Domain Names ?

This time I'm going to talk a little about how to select a domain name that is right for your business.

If you already have a busy website and you like your domain there's no need to change it but as soon as you set up a new website or if you are going to rebrand your business with a new business name you need to consider carefully what domain name to choose.

For those of your who don't know the domain name is the base part of the address you type into the browser address bar to open a website. Like "google.com" or "cnn.com"

First of all you need to know what you are going to use the domain for. It could be any of the following.

• The website of your business.
• A niche website to make money from ads or selling a ebook
• A SEO website, like a feeder blog, that exist for the sole purpose of helping your business or niche website rank in the search engines.

Considering the different purposes a domain and website can have your might want to optimize your domain for some but not all of the following

• A short name that is easy to spell and that people will remember after they have heard someone mention it on the radio or if they read about it two days ago.
• A name the is built from the nr 1 keyphrase your are targeting with SEO
•  A name that does not conflict with trademarks or business names already in use in your target market (or you could lose your domain to a trademark holder)
• A name you want to live with for many years (a lot of your marketing is tied to the domain name)
• A name without hyphens if possible
• A .COM or country specific domain for your business
• A .ORG or country specific domain for your organization

Your Business Website

When your select a domain name for your business, most of the time your want the domain name to be the same as the name of your business.

If you have a long or complicated business name it's usually best to select a domain name that is a short version of your business name, the name of a popular product you sell or a completely new name 

Branding is important here and you want a short and memorable name that you remember from the radio or from a billboard.

Always go for a .COM or a country specific domain extension, like .CA or .CO.UK,  for your business.

Use a country specific extension if the large majority of your customers are from a singly country. The country specific extension will help your search engine rankings in that country, but will reduce your rankings in the rest of the world. Many times a country specific extension will make your look more trustworthy in the local market.

Use a .COM extension of you sell to many countries and especially if you sell to the US. The United States country specific extension .US is not popular so avoid it and use .COM

There is a reason to not use .NET domains. Most people only remember the name part of the domain and automatically adds .COM when typing it into the browser address bar. This means you lose a percentage of visitors that go to the .COM domain instead, and if there is something interesting (perhaps a competitor) on the .COM domain they may never return to your hidden .NET business.

If you really want to have a .NET domain make sure to also register the .COM domain with the same name and redirect it the your .NET website. That way you don't lose the type in traffic that uses dot com by mistake.

The same goes for hyphens. Many times your visitors will not remember the hyphen when they type in your domain and you'll lose some visitors again.

Lets talk about domains for SEO and niche websites in a later newsletter.

Also remember to check out my list of best domain name registratin sites if you need a safe place to register your domains.