Optimization advice

[ClaireH-184886]

hi i write all the articles myself. everything on the site is unique although we have had people stealling content which makes me angry. how many ads would you say we should have on the right hand column and do you think we have the google ads in the right place.

[RyanKent]

how many ads would you say we should have on the right hand column and do you think we have the google ads in the right place.

It depends on your goals. If your goal is to offer the best user experience and rank the best in search engines, then no ads is definitely best. If you need to earn money from the site and have determined ads are necessary, then that is something you need to decide. There is no magic number.

The more ads you offer, the lower the quality of your site. Google knows this and will adjust your ranking accordingly.

I tried a search for the title of your article "Ryan Giggs Wife Stacey" and your site does not even make the first page of Google. Take a look at the first result: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1390206/Ryan-Giggs-wife-Will-Stacey-forgive-again.html

That page offers more content and no ads. It will always outrank your site on that basis alone, not to mention the other factors. You are in a highly competitive market. Perhaps consider other ways to earn money from your site without ads.

[ClaireH-184886]

i am glad you done the search as we wanted to try and find out how to solve this problem. we want people to find up to date articles on our site through google and this is one of the reasons why we have been working hard to try and sort the site out.

we were writing on average around 50 articles a day but were finding that not many were being found on google and we need to learn how to do this. i think i may do the following let me know what you think.

i may keep the google ads where they are and just have two ads on the right and in between the ads have other content from the site, like update articles showing like i do on the front page of our lifestyle magazine see here. http://www.in2town.co.uk

The most important issue before we look at making money from the site is to do what you have done by searching for the article. we need to know how to sort it out where our article can be found on google.

if anyone has any ideas or advice on what we can do to sort this out so our articles can be found then please do let me know

[ClaireH-184886]

i have just changed the ads on the right and would be happy if you feel this looks better and would be better for google. I am also thinking about putting under the picture a h2 tag and title to help google. maybe something like Ryan Giggs Escape Divorce Over Affair.

what do you think. i am trying to use this page to help me style all the other pages in the same manner and learn from them

[oznappies]

The long list I supplied was to give an indication of what I saw when I visited the site. Since these change regularly, I included what I saw as I found them to be sending the reverse message to the story which showed the wife forgave him yet the ads encouraged flurting etc. It was just a snapshot in time to highlight my point. The righthand column now looks more on topic since your change.

I agree with Steve and Ryan, in that the site is either about the story or about the ads and at the moment it's still about the ads and Google will rank acordingly.

[ClaireH-184886]

thanks for that. i have altered the page now to try and balance it. could you look and see if you feel it has now improved.

[oznappies]

This is what I would suggest if you wnat to keep all those ads (I have an editor's mockup here to illustrate the idea http://www.dreambuilding.com.au/content/in2town.pdf ). Keep the articles as main focus on the site and use the top of the sidebar for related articles and move the advertising to the bottom of that column.

Think of it this way, if you get 20% of your visitors clicking the ads in your current position but you only 100 vistors/day would it not produce better revenue to get 10% click through and have 1000 visitors a day, by marking the site article centric rather than ad centric?

If you also HTML5 mark that ad content as 'aside' and the main atricle as a 'article' then your may even find Google changes the way it interperates the site design and moves up your ratings.

[ClaireH-184886]

thank you this looks amazing. i am going to study it now. The reason why i done that with google ads is because google adsense gives you positions of where to put the ads for maximum revenue.

what i will do is, to change the layout and have the two layouts working on the site and see which one gets more visitors.

many thanks for your help, this is great information

[oznappies]

You also have the opportunity to set up A-B comparison experiments to check results. I know those poistion are best for revenue, but you are looking for visitors. It is a matter of having the traffic level, then getting the revenue positions optimised. If the site looks too much like an ad site, then you will not get the tweets and other social markers working for you.

[ClaireH-184886]

i agree. i am just about to write an articleon kerry katona which i will post on here with your recommendations and see the difference.

[KeriMorgret]

When you do post that new article, please post it in the same thread as this is related, rather than opening a new question. This really helps people know the history of the question rather than starting from scratch. Thanks!

[ClaireH-184886]

I have done this article and have taken on board what has been said but what i am doing is trying four different ways. so on this one i have got rid of the adverts at the top and sorted out the side but i have included in the body of the article google adsense. i will do another article and move any adverts to the bottom right. and then i can compare them all.

here is the content. http://www.in2town.co.uk/Top-Celeb-News/Kerry-Katona-Homeless-Shock