Adsense, what a great little revenue generating monster. I don’t personally know of anyone that hates it, most love it and typically the only people you hear bitching about it are the ones who have been kicked out of the program for policy violations. As for me personally, I love it because the ads are relevant, non obtrusive and if used properly they can be an excellent additional source of revenue while providing value for my site visitors.

Ideally the ads will show content that is contextually related to whatever I happen to want to write about at that time with no effort on my part above and beyond writing the content itself, but I bet you have all seen sites where you are amazed because the post is about needle point patterns but the Adsense contextual ads that are showing on the page are for WordPress themes or some other items that are in no way related to the content of the page, so you ask how can this happen? Well, it is actually quite easy because Adsense takes a minute or three to come to your site, see what’s on the page and figure out what ads to serve on that particular page and it may have a hard time figuring out exactly what the “guts” of your page is supposed to be, so it will guess and sometimes it could guess wrong.

You can ease the burden of the poor little bot and in return Adsense will deliver ads that are laser targeted (like sharks with lasers on their foreheads) to your content and it will also deliver contextually relevant ads faster than without doing this small, very easy task. If you view the source of your pages, you will see that there is quite a lot of extra “stuff” in there that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of your page, from styling components, javascript and basically everything in your header, sidebar and footer as well as the extra social bookmarks and twitter tweet concoctions you wanted to add in there so badly that you don’t care that they add 20 lines of useless code to your pages.

All you have to do, is specify what content you want your ads targeted for with a simple start and stop code that google provides but most Adsense users never find out about. You simply have to open up your theme files and place this code into the file wherever the content you want your ads to relate to is like so:

at the start of the content section insert this:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

and at the end of the content section insert this:

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
If you wanted to use this on your single.php file (displays single post pages) you could put the start code just before the <?php if (have_posts()) : ?> line and place the stop code just after the <?php endif; ?>  statement that ends the post content, by doing this you are telling Adsense to look closely at everything between these two codes. You can also add more information to the same code to tell it to ignore sections if you prefer that approach, the start code would simple look like <!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --> instead.

I hope this information is helpful, please post any questions, comments or ideas you have about this topic.