Ever wonder why the ads that Google AdSense decides to show for your blog post or site content doesn’t quite match up with what you were aiming for? Well it’s not surprise that the answer is simple, the ads are selected by a computer. Yeah, no duh right? The problem with computers doing all the work is, they don’t have the ability to distinguish context, importance, or even content as a whole. They can only look at the words you type and compare with a database that it has waiting with hundreds of possible ads. What does this mean for you? I’m glad you asked.
Analogies are like your history professor…
…They can get long winded and boring. Getting relevant ads from any automated ad provider service starts with your writing style. Do you sculpt your posts or pages with heavy analogies? If you do, you might be your own worst enemy. The analogy, while very useful in getting a human to understand your context, is essentially a site crawler’s nightmare. It has no clue that your post is about your actual topic and instead notices a large amount of time spent on the topic that is your analogy. If you are going to try and use analogies to get your point across, do it quickly and concisely.
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The 404 – File Not Found error. Its the darkest corner of your website that you probably don’t encounter too often, but do you know how often others are getting them on your site? Odds are, you don’t. One way to increase visitors (and more importantly keep visitors) is to avoid the 404 error, or embrace it by planning for it. Part of development is to always test the ‘negative case’. The case in which you know your code will fail. The same holds true in URLS. What happens if someone goes to a page or URL that doesn’t exist on your site? Go ahead, try it…I’ll wait. – There, that wasn’t so hard was it? What did you find? For most of you using WordPress, it’ll be a standard 404 page that your theme is using. Not too bad, but how many people are actually seeing this, usually content-less, page? Let’s find out.
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I have a confession to make, I’m a Google Chrome addict. *Phew* Ok, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Ever since Google Chrome moved out of beta for the Mac, I’ve given it a fair shot as my primary browser. The change from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t easy to start, but I slowly found Chrome to be must faster and more stable. The one thing I was missing…were my Extensions. Well, now that Chrome is out of beta, Google has enabled extensions for the Mac version. If you are a blogger there are plenty of great plugins to help your writing and moderating, but here are a few that I’m finding helpful.
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