This is the third chapter of the Internet Business Ideas Guide from What Sells Online!.

Placing ads from Google Adsense lets you earn some cash from your blogs or websites. You get paid each time someone clicks on these ads. Google has an algorithm that searches through the text on your site and displays ads that are relevant to your content.

Essentially, people, small businesses or corporations who join the Google Adwords program will have their advertisements featured in websites that are enrolled in the Google Adsense program.

So, what do you need to generate profits from Google Adsense?

1. Traffic, traffic, traffic

The number of clicks on your ad correlates with website traffic. The greater the number of people visiting your website, the higher the chances will be for your ad to be clicked.

Therefore, if you want to make money with Google Adsense, you first need to work on getting your traffic up.

Using the right Search Engine Optimization techniques, Picking the Right Keywords and Finding the Right Niche are all important elements in generating traffic.

2. The Right Keywords

If you are relying on top search engine rankings for traffic, then optimizing the right niche keywords would be essential. Some popular keywords are way too competitive, and therefore you need to pick long tail keywords that isn’t too competitive, but with a substantial demand volume.

Here are some quick steps to pick the right keywords:

a) Decide on a niche market which you are interested in. This could be any topic which you think people would be interested in. Keep in mind that you also need to create content for the website. Therefore, it would be ideal if you have some knowledge on the subject area.

b) Check out forums, Yahoo! Answers and newsgroups for long tail keyword ideas related to your keywords. If you are looking in newsgroups, find groups with a reasonable amount of recent activity.

c) Research on the search volume for a keyword, as compared to the number of competing websites that are also optimizing this keyword. Details on how to do this is highlighted in my previous post - How to identify niche items to sell online?

3. Register a blog or a website

It doesn’t really matter if you are going to start with a blog, or a website. More importantly however, is the domain name you choose for your blog or website. It’s best to make your primary nice keyword as part of your blog name.

While no one’s sure how Google’s ranking algorithm works, there seems to be some credit given to the use of keywords on domain names. Domain names that match a search keyword are usually bolded in search engine results.

Another important thing to optimize your website is to ensure that the META Description and META keywords used on your HTML code are defined with relevance. Search engines read website codes in order to determine the core content of a blog or website.

4. Creating content for optimization

Content written should be relevant, both to the search engine and the reader. Bold or italicize optimized words, and ensure that they appear on the title, as well as the first and last paragraphs of content.

If you are writing a blog, write 3 different articles for each post. Each post should have the keyword within the title, as well as optimized within the article content.

Keyword density, that is the number of keywords as compared with the total number of words for an article, should not exceed 5%. Otherwise, you may be classified as keyword spamming.

5. Creating incoming and outgoing links for optimization

Search engines find your site through links from other sites. Apart from that, incoming and outgoing links are used by some search engines as a basis for determining search engine rankings. The type and relevance of sites that are linking to yours (Google uses PageRank) are also significant in determining your search engine ranking.

Essentially, some search engines tend to penalize sites that do not have a balanced number of incoming and outgoing links. Thus, linking to external sites that are relevant to yours is also a necessary step in improving search engine rankings.

6. Incorporating Google Adsense onto a blog or website

This is a fairly easy step. All you need to do is to register for a Google Adsense account, and place the appropriate scripts onto your blog or website. Refer to http://adsense.google.com for more information.

Further reading:

The 30-day challenge – If you’d like to check out videos on finding your niche, identifying optimum keywords and evaluating competition for a keyword, check out The 30-Day Challenge.

5 steps to get Top Search Engine Rankings – Learn from my personal experience in getting top search engine rankings.

Next change: How to get high value clicks from Google Adsense?