Hey just wanted to share a quick tip that has help me increase my ctr in most of my sites. All you need to do is get rid of any external link, yea you can link to your own articles and your homepage but anything else, I have found that visitors will pay more atention to adsense ads when all there is in the page is the article and only 1 adsense unit (usually 336x280 above the fold) so when there are less links on the page to click on people tend to focus more on the only option they have to click (your articles or adsense) Hope this makes sense, thanks and have a nice day.
That is a nice tip. You are right. If you give the readers everything they need, then they will never click on Ads.
Where do you put links to other sites that you have exchanged links? What if you have like 10 other articles on your site and there is long list on one side? Will that deter people from clicking on the ads? I usually have links on side to my other articles and a set of links under those for link exchanges. What other type of external links are you talking about not having on a site? What kind of CTR are you seeing now?
Nice tip...it really makes sense since most visitors use external links to navigate away from a site.
To be honest I do not exchange links with other sites, they do not count that much for seo and they do not send traffic to me that much, I rather promote in social sites or forums. Now having a lot of articles that provide usufull quality information to your visitors its great, your ctr will not be as high and they are still going to clic more on your ads, in my opinion people should only keep adsense and just 1 ad unit per page, you get paid more per visitor that you lose, having 1 ad will also increase your ctr and you will keep your visitors interested in reading your content.
This is good advice, but I think it's more of a case of giving the readers less options than directing their focus. If your page doesn't give them everything they need then they'll want to leave it either via the back button or through a link. If the ad is the only link your ctr will go up.
good advice. was hoping it wouldn't be another "blend colors" tip. it does make sense. your organic visitors are looking for a solution to a problem. if they can't get it from your site, then they might get it from your advertisement or any other external links. i don't go on 1x1 link exchange campaigns either. i will eagerly if they're higher PR or authority site than mine though. all things equal, i believe a link exchange cancels out any PR juice. more one way links to your site, the better.
I think it also depends on the content vs. the ads. I seem to be lucky in that my CTR is always between 5-10% on average.. Something i've never seen before. I think it's because my site talks about one thing and right beside it is an adsense ad offering "25% of tickets" or whatever for the very same attraction my article is about. If you've got a site with information people are genuinely interested in, Adsense can be great.
I just don't think so, you do not lose any dim by link exchange you are just invest in your traffic, which will come back for you, it is a simple formula and it is just my opinion
If you can't help having links nearby without doing a massive redesign, you can use CSS to style your external links differently to remove "focus" from them. Just subtle things like remove their underline, make the font smaller then your Adsense links, make the colors blend to the background more so your Adsense links stand out and so on. Just subtle things like that will switch your readers attention towards converting links, and away from non-converting ones.
Usually I try to avoid placing affiliate links as well. For me it's either I concentrate wholly on Adsense or everything on Affiliates. Prefer not to mix together since the clicks will be split between those two.
It is good advice to lower the amount of links. I generally try to keep an external link however for SEO purposes. I think the trick is to make external links be somewhat related (again for SEO) but not so related that users don't come back. Helpful if you do have external links -> make sure they open in a new window.
You are exactly right, not only that but adding chitika, kontera, aff links etc only splits your clics and the other networks usually pay lower than adsense, so you are correct just the text and adsense, no affiliate links or any of that kontera crap, why send visitors to other less paying networks when adsense can pay higher and biseversa, if affiliate links pay more do not put adsense.
Wouldn't this affect the page rank? In most of the tips for increasing the page rank, I have read people advising to add links to other sites with highest page ranks.