Web Blog of Greg Mathews

Reading through forums I have often seen posts from people thinking about designing a site around high value keywords with the intention of earning good returns from context advertising such as Google Adsense.

Well I say Forget about high paying keywords, work on a site you know about and build on that, keeping it fresh and informative. Work on developing a site first that you can keep updating with unique content and then consider adding advertising after, do not do it the other way around.

You need traffic to earn anything from advertising on a site, generally most of that traffic would come from the search engines and other related sites.

If you concentrate on high paying keywords you will have far more competition when trying to do well in the search engines. Let me try to give an example:

You create a site based on the keyword ‘Mesothelioma’, now per click you will probably earn a good figure as it is a high value keyword, but to get listed on the first page of the Google SERPs you have to compete with more than 14 million other urls.

Now consider the keyword ‘guitar tabs’, probably not a high value keyword but far less competition in the Google SERPs, just under 2 million urls.

To earn from adsense, or any kind of advertising, you need the traffic, the higher up the SERPs you are the more traffic you are likely to get, the better your content the more inbound links you will get. As there are far less sites competing for the #1 spot in the SERPs for the keyword ‘guitar tabs’ you have more chance of getting on the first page of the search results, it still takes work but it will be a lot easier than if you based your site on the keyword ‘Mesothelioma’.

In turn, as you are positioned better you will get more traffic, more traffic then leads to more clicks.

I know from experience that this is the case, I have a number of pages on one of my websites that contain high value keywords but I get very little traffic, the same site has low value keywords but get far more traffic from which my adsense ads get more exposure and I earn more from these pages.

By all means if you are a ‘Mesothelioma’ expert and have the knowledge and expertise to maintain a site on the subject then go a head and you could do well, but you will need to work hard.