WebProNews did a bunch of great interviews at SMX West. I wanted to highlight three in particular (granted I'm a bit biased!)...

First is this interview of me is on how to optimize the flow of PageRank through your site and the tactic of "PageRank sculpting":

Second is this one of my brilliant Netconcepts' colleague Chris Smith, on the topic of optimizing your presence in Google's local search in order to boost your presence in Google's main web results via "Universal Search" (Google's blended results):

Third, this one is of my 16-year-old daughter Chloe Spencer (yeah, here I go again, proud papa bragging about my wunderkind! ), who spoke on the Generation Google panel, goes into how a kid can start a blog on a hot topic (in her case, a blog on Neopets), do a bit of SEO on it, and turn it into a cash machine with the help of Google AdSense:

Here's the Powerpoint from my "Monetizing Your Website" session at the Search Engine Room conference last week in Sydney. It's mainly about how to improve your monetization (as a publisher, not an advertiser) of the Google ads (and other contextual ads) that display from Google AdSense, but some is also relevant to YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) and other contextual advertising platforms. Enjoy!

Download PPT (1 meg)

I was describing the other day to my 14-year old daughter Chloe about how websites make money by displaying Google ads. Faster than you could say "AdSense" she abandoned her idea of starting a dog walking business and embarked on building a website about cheats, tips, giveaways, backgrounds etc. for the hugely popular Neopets.com. It's a website that she knows inside and out, I might add! Using a couple keyword research tools I showed her, she decided what to name her site and what to focus her first pages of content on. She's going to continue building content before worrying about the Google ads. A wise decision.

Of course for her plan for world domination, er, easy money, to work, she needs links. I'll do the honors and be her first inbound link, and here it is: The Ultimate Neopet Cheats Site. Note that she's targeted "Neopet cheats" instead of the more grammatically correct "Neopets cheats" because ranking highly for the former will be a much more attainable goal, and it's still fairly popular with searchers.

Anyone else willing to link to Chloe's first website? She'll be very grateful! :-)

UPDATE: My daughter has now moved her Neopets Cheats site off of WordPress.com, due to their policy of forbidding the posting of AdSense ads.

Web guru Seth Godin has revealed his top five predictions for 2006:

1. Inventory of adsense begins to catch up with demand
2. Thumbnail photos show up in adwords
3. Web pages get DRAMATICALLY better at teaching and interacting
4. Several large marketers cease to do TV
5. The Supreme Court bans email attachments.

Hello from sunny San Jose. I'm at the Search Engine Strategies conference - THE place to be if you care about search. I'm going to be blogging the sessions, so stay tuned over the next 4 days.

Here's my first installment: a recap on the session I attended before lunch today on "Earning from Search & Contextual Ads". Panelists were: Jason Calacanis, Co-Founder, Weblogs, Inc., Will Johnson, Yahoo! Search Marketing, Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc., Gokul Rajaram, Group Product Manager of Google AdSense, Google Inc. and Jen Slegg, Owner, JenSense.com.

Jen from JenSense.com started the panel off:
Jen started off by comparing and contrasting AdSense w/ Yahoo's new YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network). Similarities include...
- very large pool of advertisers
- real time stats
- neither will tell you the revenue split
- can't show both YPN and AdSense ads on the same page

Differences include...
with AdSense:
- 4 ads in smaller font
- international publishers ok
- offers additional tools & services
- more competition for higest paying
- multiple ad units per page
- "smart pricing" (CTR taken into account in pricing)

with YPN:
- 3 ads in a much larger font
- beta for US publishers
- only traditional ad units
- fewer publishers means less competition
- same ads on multiple units
- no smart pricing
- in future will be able to transfer your earnings to your advertising account

Many alternatives to AdSense and YPN:
- Kanoodle brightads: avg $0.35 earnings per click (EPC). 30,000 advertisers in network.
- Adsonar: thousands of advertisers
- Clicksor: avg $0.20 EPC. 4,000 advertisers running 20,000 campaigns. Will pull ads from other ad networks if insufficient clicks.
- Chitika: avg EPC $0.50
- Mirago: avg EPC .21p (approx $0.31 USD). you must invoice them. 12,000 advertisers
- ContextWeb: over 40,000 advertisers
bidclix: avg EPC 0.30. 11,000 advertisers
- Others include Miva Adrevenue xpress, Quigo, etc.
Rhetorical question from Jen: "When will MSN jump in?"

Optimizing tips:
- Placement: Bottom of page is bad. Good practice is to make link color the same as other links on the site. Anther good tactic is to place the ads on the left column where the nav usually is.
- Proximity:
- Ad unit selection: Try a variety of sizes and test.
- Ad unit colors & borders: Don't use the standard ad unit colors / layout. Mix things up to prevent banner blindness. Try both complimentary and contrasting colors. Most sites find hidden borders yield highest CTR. like 2 or 3 times
- URL filters: Don't do it as a way to get higher paying ads to appear. Only block your direct competitors or your own websites.

Testing:
- Use AdSense or YPN channels to track highest CTR & earnings pages. AdSense or YPN may perform better. Try both.
- Test on non-holiday weeks
- Try switching ad placement, ad unit sizes and colors
- Keep track of what works and what doesn't
- Never assume that what works on one site will work on another.

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