Google had recently come out with its Custom Search Engine (CSE), which allows you to harness the power of Google’s search engine while enhancing the relevancy and integration of search for your visitors.

Custom Search Engine allows you to:

• Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
• Place a search box and search results on your website.
• Customize the look and feel to match your website.
• Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
• Make money from relevant ads in your search results.

That you can customize the look and feel of this tool can greatly enhance your Adsense earnings by attracting more visitors to the search engine on your site.

I know this feature has been on the wish lists of many webmasters, including myself, but I’m not sure how many have implemented it on their site.

For more info, visit:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/11/your-search-engine-your-way.html

Here is some bad news for publishers hoping improve click-through rates by placing images next to Google ads.

Google is setting the record straight on positioning Google ads with thumbnail images. In brief, they do not want publishers to place images next to ads in a way that might mislead visitors to associate the ads with the image.

Below is an example of a violation:

I’ve seen an Adsense “beautifier” plugin for Wordpress that separates the images from the ads with a dotted line. According to Google, and as apparent from the figure above, the dotted lines are not going to cut it. The idea is to avoid confusion in the minds of visitors. So long as the juxtaposition can mislead the visitor to associate the images with the ads, it’s a violation.

Although Google has been warning publishers against this practice for some time, this is the first time they’ve spelled out their policy in such clear and specific language.

Some For more details, see: Google’s Adsense blog

As an Adsense publisher, I am often annoyed to find my web pages filled with public service announcements (PSA) and ads unrelated to the content of my site. Fewer relevant ads mean fewer click-throughs and ultimately lower Adsense revenues. However advanced Google’s contextual ad serving algorithm may be, it is still a computer program (as opposed to a human being) trying to figure out what a web page is about.

Below are some tips to help you optimize your pages to make them more Adsense-friendly. Note that these tips deal with ad delivery rather than ad formatting or placement. While ad formatting and placement may affect ad click-through rates, they have nothing to do with the delivery of relevant ads to your site. Your site must display relevant ads before they have any chance of being clicked on.

1. Avoid too much content on a page

If Adsense does not understand what is your page is about, it cannot deliver ads targeted to its content. Although a human being can easily tell what a web page is about by taking a glance at it, computer algorithms are no so intelligent. If your page contains too much content, chances are that it also contains too many seemingly unrelated keywords. Adsense becomes confused and displays PSAs or ads unrelated to the topic of your page. Try dividing the page into smaller ones, each focusing on just a few related keywords.

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I know many aspiring web entrepreneurs face this dilemma all the time: should I build a single site that makes me $200 a day from Adsense or 200 smaller (mini) sites that each makes just $1 a day?

The truth is, it’s not that easy to have a site that makes $1 a day. You can’t spend just 20 minutes setting up a made-for-adsense site, submit it to the search engines, and expect it to earn $1 a day for the rest of your life. More likely, the site will languish in cyberspace, earning a few pennies here and there, but it will never get enough visitors to average $1 a day. To have a site that makes $1 a day requires a fair amount of content-building and promotion. That’s not even to mention the costs of registering, renewing, and hosting 200 domain names.

Most of us will probably end up doing something in between– building a handful of quality sites that can be maintained and promoted on a regular basis. It would help to focus on topics that interest you, so that the tasks of content- and link-building will not become too much of a burden.

The bottom line: whether you decide to build one big site or 200 minisites to earn $200 a day from Adsense, don’t expect it to be a cakewalk. It’s getting tougher and tougher these days to make money through contextual advertising networks like Adsense and YPN. But then again, I know people — too bad I’m not one of them– who are raking in over $10,000 a month from Adsense. These success stories are a great source of inspiration (if not income) to me.