Improving your targeting: AdSense as a foreign language

One of the questions many new AdSense users ask is how to improve the targeting of their ads. The ads may seem completely random, or targeted to a particular keyword that has nothing to do with what their site is about.

To understand what to do in this situation, we have to understand a bit about the workings of AdSense and the AdSense bot. AdSense is built on software. Like all software, it won't do what you want by magic. You have to help it to give you what you want.

The Google AdSense bot is in some ways similar to the standard Googlebot which crawls your site for indexing in Google's search engine. You might have seen the AdSense bot's activity in your website logs, listed as "Mediapartners-Google".

Like Googlebot and other search engine robots, the AdSense bot scans the text of your page to identify important keywords and phrases. Instead of indexing your page in a search engine, AdSense uses this information to select advertisements which may be relevant to your page. The bot doesn't "understand" what your site is about - it only knows that certain keywords appear more frequently than others, that certain keywords appear in more "important" positions on the page, and so on.

The AdSense bot is just software, and software doesn't really understand English (or any other natural language). Imagine listening to someone speaking in a foreign language - you might deduce that some words are particularly important to what's being said, because the speaker repeats them a lot, or uses a particular tone of voice. But you don't really understand what they're saying.

Rewriting your content to make it easier for the AdSense bot to "understand" is a lot like this. Here are 4 simple steps you can take, based on the "foreign language speaker" metaphor:

1. Repeat yourself. If a word or phrase is important to your page and you want the AdSense bot to pick up on it, use it often in your content.

If you don't repeat the keywords you consider important, AdSense may well consider all the words in your content to be equally important. In this case it will just pick a word semi-randomly, and the resulting ads may seem completely unrelated to the purpose of your site.

At the same time, it's important not to go too far with this. Make sure all the repetition you use would sound natural to your human visitors - who are, after all, your most important visitors.

2. Use word variants. For example: boat, boats, boating. The AdSense bot is smart enough to pick up on these, and the variety can help avoid annoying your human visitors.

3. Use related words. For example: ships, sailing, yachts.

4. Put important words in important places. The keywords that are most important to you should go in your page title, or in your headings.

If at all possible, try to put important keywords in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator, also known as a a web address) of your pages. AdSense seems to place a special importance on this and will often look to the URL before it looks to any other part of your page. For example, http://www.example.com/boats/