Tip #5: Manage Your Own Adsense Account.
This tip comes directly from a conversation I had with someone who had been ripped off. Why were they ripped off? Because they weren't in control of their AdSense account.For some sites, an AdSense account is like a license to print money. Now, most sites aren't making thousands of dollars a month from AdSense, but it's very feasible for niche sites to make a hundred or more dollars a month -- see Rick's recent entry on Feedbuzzard, for example. Whether you're making a lot or not so much, it's still extra income that should be coming your way.
I say should because the reality is that many people outsource the management of their sites third parties. Not everyone has the time or the expertise to develop their own Web pages (though it's not that's difficult to learn the basics), so outsourcing the development and maintenance of a site may make sense in many cases. But don't outsource the management of your AdSense account or, worse yet, let someone else use their own account to display ads on your site. The AdSense account should be registered in your name (or the name of your business), not in anyone else's name. The money should be sent to you directly, as should the tax information. If you want to give the guys maintaining your site a cut of the revenue, fine, but do it yourself from the money that Google sends you, don't have the money sent to Google.
For similar reasons, make sure that the ownership and control of your domain name rests with you and not a third party. Your domain name (or domain names, it's common to have more than one, even if they just point to the same site) is a valuable resource, it's part of your brand. Take the time to learn how to use a domain name registrar (it's easy) and manage the names yourself. If you ever have problems with your hosting service, for example, you won't be held hostage by them (you do have local backup copies of your website, don't you?) if you control the domain name -- there are plenty of web hosting companies out there eager for your business.
Tip #5: Carefully Craft blog or forum pages.
AdSense publishers often complain that the ads that get shown on blog and forum pages are not really that relevant to the topics being discussed. This is because the Mediapartners crawler -- the crawler that fetches and analyzes pages that display AdSense ads -- visits pages at unpredictable intervals. The first impression you make to that crawler, as discussed in Tip #1, is therefore extremely important. The first time the crawler visits your forum/blog there better be some relevant content on display there.
There's another problem with many blogs and forums: the keyword density is skewed by all the links and extra "fluff" found on the page. For example, many blogs have multiple feed links listed on the page. These are often images. If those images all have alt attributes that say something like "RSS feed for GoofySite.com, a blog about Goofy" then "blog", "feed" and "Goofy" will have higher densities than you might expect, especially if (in this case) "Goofy" and "GoofySite.com" show up in other places on the page (links to the home page, links to other pages on the site, alt attributes for images, and so on). You shouldn't be surprised if all the ads you see for that blog end up being related to blogging and/or Goofy, and not necessarily the specific topics being discussed.
There's no predicting when the Mediapartners crawler shows up, so it's hard to tune things for it. You can control when the first crawl occurs, though, so spend some time tuning that first crawl by making sure the blog/forum is displaying the right kind of content. Use a keyword density checker on the page before you place ads on it to make sure things are OK, then activate AdSense for that page.
Note that you'll have better control over permalink pages and thread-specific pages, provided again that you don't have too much fluff on those pages, either.
If things are really bad, rename the page and place a redirect in the old page's place. But the ads that were showing weren't well-targeted, because in my hurry to get the page up (there's another AdSense tip -- take your time!) I had neglected to check the keyword density. But when I did, after the fact, it's because that "fluff" I mentioned above was overpowering the Vioxx-related keywords. When I activated the ads on the new page, the crawler was able to correctly figure out what the keywords were and now the ads that are shown there are highly relevant.
The fix-and-rename technique works well, but it's not always possible to do it, in which case you just have to wait for the Mediapartner crawler to revisit your site. Perhaps Google's new sitemap feature will help in this regard, but I haven't done any experiments yet to know if that's true or not.
