How to drive revenue from ads on your site

Yahoo blog - As a publisher, it’s important to know how to optimize your web site to help drive better traffic. This can help drive up your program earnings which is enough motivation for most publishers.

Last year, Yahoo!’s Cody Simms and Amit Paunikar wrote in a great four-part series on this blog about various optimization practices. In case you missed it—and in case you don’t have time to read a four-part series—we’ve boiled it down to some key tips to help your business.

Focus on making your site as text-based as possible

“Crawlers” are programs that analyze the content on your site for ad targeting purposes. Be sure to include important topic-oriented items in the text fields of your site, rather than hinting at them in image or other elements.

Consider adding dynamic content on the home page

Content that frequently changes while remaining on-topic for your audience not only keeps the interest of your audience, it perks up the attention of our content analyzers. Static content could bore users, which may result in low click-through rates.

Structure your site

Your site structure helps your users and our systems to understand what your site is about. Here are some tips:
• Integrate keywords into your URL structure. Consider using permalinks, rather than query strings.
• Use strong keywords as “anchor text.” Link text should be descriptive rather than text like “Click here.”
• Use concise descriptors. Put short descriptions under a link when possible.

Content do’s

You want to make your content relevant, which helps drive your click-through rate. Relevant content can also help ads become more appealing to your users. Here are several actions to take that should help on this front:
• Write for users. Users generally come to your page to read your content, not to click on ads.
• Maintain your editorial integrity. Write unique articles that drive traffic to your site.
• Take time to optimize your web pages. Use distinct titles, headers and section headlines for each article.
• Limit the number of low-content pages on your site. If you have a page with a lot of images, make sure you use alternate text.
• Maintain a high “signal-to-noise” ratio. Keep the content of each page focused on one or two topics at most.

Content don’ts

Simplicity helps clarity, so you don’t want to load your site down with too much stuff. Here are a few tips of what not to do with your content:
• Don’t use unnecessary code.
• Don’t use unnecessary language.
• Don’t try to take shortcuts around lack of content or traffic.
• Whatever network you use, don’t violate the “Terms of Service” or “Terms and Conditions.”