Best performing banners.

This post is not meant for readers to click on ads.

You have your website and now you want to advertise so what are you doing? You create your adsense account and you put your banner. But wait, which size should you use? Of course you want to chose the size that will make you earn the money! Lucky enough we were told which banner is the best performing and it is:

1. 336x280 - the large rectangle
2. 300x250 - the medium or inline rectangle
3. 160x600 - the wide skyscraper

So now you can put those banners all over the place in your site and you will get rich! Unfortunately no! First of all you have to check if those banner fit to your site. Maybe you need to change the display and then your site doesn't look natural anymore. On the other hand it seems that the least performing banner is the 468x60 banner.

If you have a lot of content you can add some small add in the middle and make it look as part of your content. Popular size to do that is the 300x250 banner. It is easy to wrap the content around that banner but it should be done if you have enough content to put around. If you have less content you can try with the some smaller ones of the following size:

125x125 Button
180x150 Small rectangle
200x200 Small square

Then, once you decided on the size and where to put the ad you have to chose the colors. You can chose some discreet colors in line with the colors and font of the site. In that case you make the reader believe that the ad is part of the content in the hope that he will click.

Or you chose something that is really outstanding with bright colors so that you are yelling that this is an ad in the hope that the user will see it and click on it.

Which strategy you should chose? I don't know! Try both, make some tests and compare the results. Try with one type of ad for a periode of time that is long enough to have enough data and then try with another type of ad for the same period of time. You need to test many things and keep records of everything you changed and how it impacted your CTR (click thru rate) but don't do too many changes at a time or you will not be able to know what impact your changes had.

What an SEO report should contain.

Here is a short summury of what an SEO report should contain.

"The SEO Website Report must be the first step of any SEO project initiation. Without a thorough SEO Website Report it is not possible to determine the current Search Optimization status or future recommendations. The SEO Website Report is the base document from which SEO Strategic Planning will be developed.

The following evaluation criteria are not strictly Search Engine Optimization and include other related issues which are required to make a website successful. SEO should utilize a heuristic approach for the overall good of the website."

Read more

A way to find quality keywords for free.

Here is an article about how to find good keywords for free. The method is a bit time consuming but really worth a try. Moreover, it is free. It uses as main tool Google's keyword tool and I would suggest to be careful with that tool since it often suggests really irrelevant keywords. Better use your imagination to find keywords and then check if they are good keywords as described in the article.

Here is the article:

"For people to find your web page, you need high-quality keywords. A high-quality keyword is a keyword that many people are searching for but few other web pages are using. You need to battle past your competitors to get to page one of the search engines, so the fewer the competitors, the better. Once you get there, you want a lot of customers to find you. Here’s how you can find quality keywords."

Read more here.