A heatmap by Google

Google Adsense has become ubiquitous in the Web 2.0 industry, as more and more startup companies (and bloggers) rely on the text advertising as their primary stream of revenue. Although setting up Adsense on your website may be easy, optimizing it can be tricky.

Graywolf's SEO Blog has an informative article that consolidates the Google Adsense advice you might find around the Internet into a page you can bookmark and save for future reference. He provides advice and ideas that might help you increase the amount of money your Adsense brings in.

An interesting trick he mentions involves placing related images next to the advertising links to boost the click-through rate.

One of the latest ’secrets’ to make the rounds is using images placed directly above or below an adsense leaderboard. This has been used for a while but came out in a digital point forum thread where a member talked about quadrupling their CTR. Basically you set up the adsense code in a table with four images that line up directly with the ads. Whether or not this is deceptive is fuzzy and very subjective. Obviously four blinking arrows would be ‘enticing people to click’ and be against the adsense TOS. However placing pictures of 4 laptops over laptops ads isn’t, so use your best judgment here and look at it from the advertiser or Google’s perspective. If you have a question as to your implementation being ‘over the line’ write to adsense and ask them to take a look.

As far as using the images, I’ve done it and can tell you it definitely works. You get the best results when the images ‘complete the story the ads are telling’. For example if you have ads about apple pies, use pictures of freshly baked apple pies, instead of granny smith, Macintosh, pink lady, and braeburn apples.

An example of this can be seen in the image below:

Read the full article for more insightful tips into boosting your revenue:

Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets