by: Bas de Baar
A lot of webmasters that use Adsense as a source of income, are going after the so called high paying keywords. There are methods to determine this, you can even buy lists that hand them over to you. However, after they have put up there “high paying” pages there is no sound of the expected cash.
Having those pages is one thing... Driving visitors towards them, is another. The easiest, and most obvious way to funnel people to your high paying keyword pages, is by optimizing your site navigation for this purpose.
When people visit your website, they don’t always view just one page. They also get from their entry page to another page that they might find interesting. They find this page by links that are provided to them on their page of entry. How you help people to get around on your site is what is meant by “Site Navigation”.
A typical website has a menu on each page; a menu that gets them from one section to another on your site. What decides them to click on a link to another section is the words used to indicate the link. “Free Resources” or “Download ebooks” might get their attention.
In respect to your Adsense earnings, you should track your site navigation to drive people to your high paying pages. I have some pages that get a lot of traffic from search engines, but the earnings on these pages are very low. So I use some clever navigation on these pages to lure people to some higher earning pages. By using this technique you can turn some cheap clicks into dollars.
How to start the testing?
First of all, you must have something to track, something to compare. Second, you must select some high earning pages you want to funnel your traffic to.
To get the fastest results, you should select some of your highly visited pages.
Then you have to think about what might convince people on a particular page to move to a high earning page. Try to find some description that would get their attention. Next step is to think about a suited location to place the link on the webpage.
Within the article itself, on the bottom as recommended resources, just above the main menu... Get creative and, especially, look around at other site to see how they do it (e.g. Hot Pages list, or Most read articles are very common).
You don’t have to stick with plain text links. You can also use some graphic to get peoples attention. Look around, and get ideas.
As with the testing of Adsense ads, try different texts on different pages, so you can get a feeling of what works and what not. Mix and match, put links on top, put them on the bottom.
And after that, it’s just testing, tracking, testing and tracking again.