Payday Loans, Adsense and a Money Making Strategy

When it comes to making money with Adsense I don't tell Google what I'm relevant for in terms of content - I let Google tell me. If this is confusing then hear me out.

A week or two ago I wrote a couple of posts on the topic of payday loans. Now most of you would agree that a make money online blog has little relevance to Payday Loan sites. For the most part, this is true. I am in the midst of an experiment to see if I can't make the two relevant. Why I would want to do this and how it is done is the key for making money with Adsense.

A search engine isn't smart. It simply gathers as much information as it can and then presents it's findings in the order stipulated by the human brains that programmed it. It can't tell you who the greatest author in the English language is but it can tell you who others think the greatest author is. Most people who know what a dangling participle is would say Shakespeare. What does Google say?



Close but no cigar.

If Google was smart it would have got this right and it almost did but the fact that it was wrong highlights the priorities of the programmers and the limitations on how far you can tweak an algorithm.

You can learn much from this query.

Of all the keywords presented it chose "author" as the prime search term. Not "greatest" or "English".

It ranked the sites according to who has the most relevance to "Author" and then by which site has the most authority on the subject.

It chose time.com over the correct answer because it is more relevant to the term "author" and the time article covers authors from 1923 to present. Google defaults to a "most current" status when indexing pages and since I didn't specify "of all time" it decided that a list of authors from 1923 to present would be the more likely choice of what I wanted. Wrong - see it's dumb. You knew that I wanted to know who the all time greatest author was without specifying "all time". In fact "all time" is a given - if I was asking a person this question I would only specify a time period if I didn't want an "all time" answer. A brain can intuit a meaning from an incomplete array of words - a search engine can only sort words and attach a value to each one.

So what happens if I add "of all time" to the query?



The results are now worse as old Willy got knocked down a couple of pegs. Google has now decided that the prime keyword is "All Time Greatest" and presents a list of authors, novels, films and so on. Boy is it stupid.

But... this is good.

If you understand this then you can use it to rank well in the search engines - let me clarify that - you will rank well in Google. When I refer to search engines understand that I am only concerned with Google as that's where the money is.

There is a correlation between high page rankings and Adsense optimization. If you have one you have the other. To put it another way - if your pages are optimized for the best Adsense ads then you are also optimized for high search results and failure to capture them rests with the quality of your backlinks. I mention this for those of you who aren't interested in Adsense but do want to know how to target search engine traffic. For the most part the tweaks used to optimize your blog for Adsense also optimize your blog for the serp's so follow along if you will.

I said earlier that I let Google tell me what I am relevant to. I do this by writing huge rambling posts covering everything I can think of for a topic. In the process I use my prime keyword and as many related terms as I can while still keeping the post readable. Am I stuffing keywords - yes but not in a spammy way and always within limits.

If you go back and read my opening sentence and the first paragraph below it you will find I mention "making money", "Payday Loan" and "Adsense" twice each. I didn't force their use and the writing isn't dismal to read. ( It might be but that is only due to my deficiencies as a writer and not on purpose.)

Moreover I actually used the term "making money with Adsense" twice and I even got my blogs numero uno keyword "make money online" into the mix.

and...

I used all three of todays keywords in my post Title and they will be in the tags (labels on blogger) at the end. I have also just used all the terms again in the preceding paragraph and I will probably fit them in again a few times before I am done with this post.

A human reading this post knows what it is about. Some guy is telling you how to optimize your blog for Adsense and search engine rankings. Google's little bot will know that this post has something to do with Adsense, Payday loans, SEO, Google, relevancy, search engines and a bunch of stuff I haven't thought of. By later today or tomorrow Google will tell me what it thinks this page is relevant to. I'll check my stats and see which keywords are used to bring visitors to my blog. Those keywords are what Google has pegged this page for.

After completing the first two "payday loan" posts I waited for the hit results to start showing up. Using notepad I keep track of what terms are used to find my loan posts. They were all long tail searches which I have listed below;

payday loan industry competition - rank is 20

cashadvancelinkdirectory.com - rank is 3

make money online with payday loans - rank is 4 and 5

make money with payday loans - rank is 3

emergency cash - loan - rank is 110

pay day loan reviews - rank is 16

loan money online - rank is 26

how much does payday loans make - rank is 4

Each term above was used at least twice by searchers and originated from different IP's. Terms that are really obscure are rarely used more than once and I ignore them when making my short list.

This list tells me that Google thinks my post(s) is relevant to these terms or it wouldn't have listed me for them. It only lists my post pages and not my home page. This tells me that Google hasn't listed my blog as relevant (or it has and it is so far down in the serps that I won't see it.) just a couple of pages are and only for some minor long tails. The one exception is the term "Emergency Cash Loans" which is one of the money making prime keywords related to Payday Loans. This is good as it gives me something to work with and serves as a barometer for how well I succeed. I will work at getting on page 1 from a starting position of page 11. As I see movement downward I will know my strategies are working.