Learning the ropes; Looking for suggestions

Looks like your ads are relevant. And the ads seemed to be placed well.

It appears that most of the Google ads are about swimming with dolphins, I would suggest beefing up the content on your site to focus on that topic. And use the keyphrase "swimming with dolphins" in titles, frequently in content, in your HTML title. Also add a Meta description tag that uses the phrase.

BTW, your "Home" link does not work on any of your pages. This will cause some visitors to quickly abandon your site.

 

Looked at your site and a couple things that may be worth trying came to my mind:

1. Place an ad links block (728x15) on every page, between the site's title and the content
2. On the main page place the banner ads after the "wellcome..." title but before the text
3. On the articles pages, put the same kind of banner ads after the page title (or try a 250x250 / 300x250 block on different pages) and relocate the actual vertical ads to the right (grey) column (instead of the right side of the contents column).
4. Consider keeping the size of the columns fixed (around 760 pixels in total for the 3 columns) and centred on the page
5. Use grey in the background of your site search box and eventually adjust the colour of the left column to mach that colour

Hope it helps

 

Thanks for pointing out that broken link - it's fixed now!

 

Thank you for the tips. I will change the color of the search box, and perhaps try the different ad locations. As far as the leaderboard goes, that is way too wide for the site when viewed in less than 1024x768 resolution. In fact, it gives me scroll bars to scroll horizontally, which of course is not optimal.

 

I recommend you read the free downloadable book in my sig.It taught me a lot when I was just starting out.

Good luck with your site.

 

Alright - I have revamped my ad layout - I have placed link units on the left, moved my navigation bar to the right, and placed baners at the top of ever article. How does it look now?

 

Not to sidetrack the thread (good luck with the dolphin site!), but returning to the general title of this thread, what would everyone say are their top 5 things to do to make an adsense site successful? I'm a bit of a newb myself, but so far the things that have been most useful to me are:

1) A clean layout
2) Good content about things a broad range of people would be interested in
3) No broken links or sloppy coding
4) Headers at the tops of my pages have been generating more clicks than skyscrapers on the right side
5) Referalls from sites of friends of mine

And, a general question for everyone out there, do you think that including meta tags with keywords still provides much of a benefit in terms of deriving traffic from search engines? I've heard that they don't help that much with google, but that is from a friend of a friend, and I don't know much about how other search engines work these days.

(Feel free to move this post if it should be in another place)

 

Let us know if this changes improve CTR. Thanks.

 

Well, they don't appear to as of yet, but my traffic dropped as google dropped me 43 rankings today on my most active keyword, from 4 to 47.... *grrrr*...