What every website owner needs to know about contextual advertising – it affects your bottom line!

You've probably visited many websites which bombard you with huge, flashy banner ads and other advertising which is only loosely related to the content of the particular page. For example, you might click through to a web page with an article on children's education. The distracting banner, proclaiming you to be the one millionth visitor to that page, offering a prize if you only click and claim it, runs the width of the top of the page. This type of banner ad has no relevance to the information you seek and is probably not legitimate anyway. The blinking and flashing is annoying you, so you scroll down until it's out of your view and read what you came to see. This is a blatant example of what contextual advertising is not.

Good contextual advertising is organized page by page, so that every ad your reader sees relates closely to the content on that page. You know about Google Adsense. When you sign up for this program, Google's spiders go out and examine each page's content and then match up the most relevant ads to place on your page. The latest trend in the big search engines, especially a focus on Google, is to deliver to the user the most relevant content pages when the user conducts a search.

It's most likely that you'll have other ads, such as affiliate links, on your web pages. If every ad on the page is closely related to the content, you'll enjoy a much better ranking with the search engines. You'll certainly beat out a competitor who is running the 'one millionth visitor' banner!

This is why you want to hand pick your ad placements for every single page on your site. Google Adsense picks ads based on algorithm-based programs and does quite a good job. Think how you can zero in on ads with even more refinement, in terms of contextual advertising! For example, your gardening blog has a page which has a detailed article on how to graft roses. Perfect ads that are well qualified as powerful contextual advertising might include a book on grafting roses, or garden tools used for grafting. An ad for more generalized products, such as garden globes or pathway paving stones are not going to engender the same amount of interest. You'll get far less ROI on such ads and suffer in page rankings as well. Moving these ads to a page with content related to garden statuary or decorations is a better move.

Keywords are another important factor in optimizing every page. If your ad links to an affiliate, check out the page title and keywords that affiliate is using. Matching up keywords will also do your site good from the standpoint of relevance.

Well thought out contextual advertising brings more visitors to your sites through better search engine rankings, and you'll enjoy an increase in revenues. Contextual advertising is an art, well worth cultivating and refining to the Nth degree. Relevance and in context are where it's at and it's all within your grasp!