This free guide is written by someone who's been a publisher since the early days of Adsense program (June 2003). The first full day I ran Adsense ads on my website I earned a whole $2.26! At the time I was really pleased by this, but through optimisation I would now earn at least $18 from that same amount of traffic. In fact since September 2006 I've been making double-digit dollar figures every single day from running Adsense ads on my site, with my best earning day so far bringing in $103.23.

The rest of this guide contains my invaluable tips on how to improve your Adsense bottom line. These tips are easy to implement and concentrate on optimising ads on your website (or freeing up your time) rather than approaching it from the harder challenge of spending time (and possibly money) attracting more visitors to your site.

Firstly, if you don't have an Adsense account already sign up for one, it's free and you need one to generate the code to put on your website. To do so, simply click on the link below, then return to this page once you're finished.

Welcome back! If you are based in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United States or the United Kingdom and have a bank account Google will pay your Adsense earnings straight into your account! As a foreign publisher who used to get charged exorbitant fees by my bank for paying in the monthly Adsense foreign currency cheques and used to have to wait in line and then have a clerk fill out a form in triplicate this really is a timesaver!

To set it up, log into your account, click on the My Account tab, scroll down to Payment Details and click edit. The "Add a new bank account" radio button should already be selected, so click Continue. The instructions are clear enough to follow from here. The procedure is basically once you've entered your details, Google makes a test deposit. You then enter the amount the deposit was for to verify its your bank account. Once the account is verified Google will use it for future payments until you tell Google otherwise. You can find bank account details on cheque books, statements or by logging into internet banking (if you have this for your accounts).

So, now you've got the boring stuff out of the way onto the interesting part - adding the Google Adsense ads to your site. However before you do that it is worth your while to implement section targetting. What is section targetting? It's how you can suggest to the Adsense targetting bot to focus (or not focus) on certain sections of the page.

For example, on my website (about video games) I have a navigation bar to different sections on my site. I use section targetting to tell the Adsense bot to downplay the importance of the navigation bar when choosing the ads for the page. This way PC related ads appear on the PC section instead of less relevant Xbox ads.

To designate a section to downplay you merely use the following tags at the start of the section you want it to downplay and at the end. If you want to emphasise a section instead (eg what's in the title tag) use the tags and instead.

Once you've made these changes to your page, remember to save it and upload it to your webserver. Now for adding the ads themselves!

Log into your Adsense account and choose the Adsense Setup tab. Then choose Adsense for Content. Leave the radio button where it is on Text and image ads. If Ad Unit/Text and image ads aren't selected do so before clicking on Continue.

You now have a wide variety of choices to make. Personally I've found a 300x250 in the centre of the page with a 336x280 ad in the centre of the page with a 160x600 ad in the right sidebar works best, although it depends on the design of your site. Whatever ads you choose, the colour scheme is very important.

Blending means you'll get a higher clickthrough rate and make more from the ads as people are less likely to regard them as ads and therefore ignore them. What do I mean by blending? If the background colour of your page is white (colour #FFFFF), make this the colour of your border and background. The title tag should be blue (colour #0000FF) as this is the colour people associate with a link online and will mean more people click on the ads. The text and URL colour should be the colour of your text on your site.

As we're blending corner styles, don't matter so skip this bit. Regarding the alternate ads option, you can display ads from another ad provider when Google can't find any. However this rarely happens (and is hardly worth your time setting it up for each size of ad, so just click continue.

You can now choose a channel in order to track your ad. Some custom channels (eg for the different sizes of ads) can be good as it allows advertisers to target a particular type of ad. However I tend to use URL channels instead; which one is better for you depends on how many pages there are on your site. Bear in mind there's a limit of 200 channels (both custom and URL) so use them wisely! Click Continue

The code to insert into your page will now be displayed on your screen. Click on the text box and the code will be highlighted. Then copy (either Ctrl+C or in Firefox you can rightclick and select copy) the code. You can now paste it (Ctrl+V) into your page using whatever program you use to design your pages. Personally I prefer using a text editor called Editpad for doing this, but people use a variety of programs from WSYWIG editors like Dreamweaver to programs that are a hybrid of the two. Make sure when you're inserting the code that you're viewing the actual code. Your page should show a lot of tags with greater and less than signs around them if you're doing it correctly. Simply paste the code into your page, save the page. Then upload it to your webserver (or view it locally) to check it worked. There is an Adsense heatmap to use which shows you the best places to position the ads on your page for maximum impact. I suggest first running your ads for a day for a baseline, then tweaking things to see what improves your results. Good luck!

P.S. If you run a forum website the heatmap is slightly different. This page goes into a few more tips including the use of link units. Personally I'm not a great fan of link units, but your mileage may vary! Danielle Grufferty