1. Anonymous Bronze

    Director at Commercial Reality Ltd

    22 June 2004 08:48am

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    The AdSense preview tool comes with a feature that many people will fail to exploit.

    When you use it on your own website it tells you what Google thinks your site is about.  This gives you 2 bits of valuable information. 

    First, you can see if Google really "understands" what you've been writing about.  If the ads you see in the Tool are "off message" (to borrow a phrase from somewhere else) then you have a problem because it means that Google thinks your site is about something else: bad news for your Search Engine Optimisation plans.

    Secondly, it can tell you where to take your site over time. If you see a lot of ads about a particular product or service, you could extend your site to cover those things in more detail.  The chances are that this will increase the value of your clicks over time because the better targeted the ads are to the page (and the site), the more you get paid per click.  Turning this on its head means that if you write new pages that are targeted to the ads, the ads you see on those pages will be better targeted and so will pay you more money per click.

    As an experiment I ran the AdSense Preview Tool on this page: I saw just 3 ads.  2 were for jobs via recruitment agencies for the same large IT employer.

    If e-consultancy.com joined the  AdSense program, they should start building some career advice pages.

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