Marketing Strategy

The Most Common Ways to Break a Google AdSense Ad

When your website marketing strategy has ad revenue as the end goal, you have to expect that the game isn’t going to be as easy as you at first think it will be. Ad revenue is a very thin margin even in the best of scenarios. It takes volume to make it grow. And countless website owners have gotten frustrated or impatient with their ad revenue and gotten themselves in trouble by trying some dumb trick or another rather than engage a professional digital marketing agency.

Here’s a list to avoid being a statistic and having Google ban you:

Excessive keyword stuffing

Number-one with a bullet, people still try this nonsense today. Google already knew it would happen when they launched way back in 1997. These sites get found and blacklisted sometimes within minutes of posting! Trust us, Google knows when a search term is repeated just to pull in a search engine and focus an ad. That is why they are Google.

Altering the results of an ad click

This is an unexpected one, but lately some site owners have attempted to monkey with the ad click results in ways like framing the ad target site or redirecting it. Huge violation of TOS, and it’s happening more as AJAX methods get more sophisticated.

Colour masking

It is true that Google allows you to customize the colours of an ad unit to your taste, either making it stand out in contrast of blend in for aesthetics. Some site owners get cocky and set things like the ad unit’s text or link colours to the webpage background colour, or set it into a CSS div with the alpha set to transparency and then using absolute positioning to have different content behind it… There’s a million ways to pull little tricks to hide an ad, and they all spell “TOS violation” and get you banned.

(more…)

Web Design Changes to Expect in 2013

You could say web design has its own ‘fashion statement,’ because each year things come and go. Let’s look at web design changes you can expect to see in 2013.

  • Large Visual Impact Created with Large Images
    While there is a focus on typography over images throughout the website, on the home page it seems big just might be better, as many websites are placing large images on the home page for a visual impact. Web designers are being conscious of data usage and bandwidth by providing these large images only to those with large screens.
  • More White Space Please!
    Over the past year or so, we have been seeing a move towards more white space, and this trend is going to continue in 2013. Finally, web designers are recognizing that white space creates a clean design aesthetic and a much easier read for the surfer.
  • It’s All About Social Network Sharing
    There will be more integration with social media on websites. We’re not talking about ‘sharing buttons,’ as that’s old news already. This is going to be much more in-depth and include things like ‘pay by status,’ ‘single sign on,’ ‘Instagram,’ and other new types of social media content.

(more…)