Can my placements be improved?

Check it out: http://www.albertatalks.ca

I'm thinking about moving the Square (on the individual articles, which is where most of the traffic is direct directly to) so it's embeded into the text, but it will effect my layout greatly with pictures.

 

maybe mix things up a bit and move the logo in the header to the right, so the 728x90 will be the natural place where people will go when they want to go back to the front page of the site, and maybe they'll click on a ad instead, because hopefully it looks interesting.
Otherwise in individual pages, the ad in the text would maybe better in the left side of the article.

 

Any reason why the ads would be better on the left side of the article in the text than the right? Not that I don't believe you, but I would like to have some reasoning before I move it.

 

Because when people want to go back to the front page, if they arrived from google to an inside page, or if they're browsing the site, they will instinctively look for the logo on top-left where usually they can click, like it is now on your site and on millions of sites.
If you move the logo to the right (with same link behavior) you let the opportunity for the most-left ad of the 728x90 block to be read a lot more often than when it sits at the right of the logo. If people happens to find interesting this first ad text, they'll click to see it.
As you have it now, they might even not read the ad, just looking at the big logo on top-left to click on to go back to the front page, so you're loosing many opportunities each day that an ad could be read and sometimes clicked.

 

I know about the logo, that was explained in the original post.

But why move the square ad to the left?

 

oh yes, bad reading of your question. For the real question the answer is still the same, most users expect the text of the article to be on the left below the title, if an ad is there, they might click it, but if you want to try, use a 234x60, it's even smaller (less space problem) and at least there's one ad, they don't have choice it's this link or no other. By making it stand out, if it happens that the ad is well written and seems interesting, click rate will improve.