Below are my findings.

The following Adsense ad sizes or link units are top performing:
250×250 Square
336×280 Large Rectangle
160×600 Wide Skyscraper

The following ad sizes or ad units don’t perform well:
468×15 Link Unit
468×60 Banner
200×90 Link Unit
120×90 Link Unit
728×90 Leaderboard
160×90  Link Unit

Ad sizes with dimensions of great heights get more clicks. Link Units and Ad sizes with medium ascent take up notable page clicks. Real Estate, in comparison, gets clicked the least.

Profitable ad types and units
Text ads and static image created the most cash flow where as Animated Images, Rich Media, or Flash ads didn’t get as many traffic clicks.  Ad Units weren’t making astounding profits, and most feel it better benefit the population to turn them into site dust.

Popular ad design clicks
In looking at Adsense text ads, and at my top performing sites and pages, I noticed that several sites that have ads with the vivid color difference on the site URL  which in turn, get clicked more frequently. As an example, on one of my top performing sites, The URL color is vivid red and it’s the only uniquely brightly lit red item on the page layout.

Best Place for Adsense ads
Taking into consideration the 2012 Google’s Panda layout algorithms, It’s not correct to have more than three ads on a side, and only one or two ads can be used at maximum, above the fold. This gives the page layout a user friendly feel, as opposed to a MFA (Made For Adsense) site. In retrospect, for the best performing and placement for the ad is at the bottom of the content.

In 1993, I started a PR firm and in early 2000 made a media division of the firm.  Over time, I have built a portfolio of approximately 200 online magazines and blogs of various topics, focused on many different industries and demographics.  I always noticed that the timing of publishing greatly effect how much exposure it draws, including email blasts, press releases, and publishing articles.

When it comes to marketing, my rule of thumb is that success comes from analyzing what is and is not working.  To achieve greater readership, I examined my analytics and looked into what industry experts said about timing and posting content. After correlating the data, here are my findings:

Increasing Traffic

When do people read blogs / online publications?
Blogs are read throughout the day, not just at one specific time. However, experts and my analytics indicate that 75% of people read blogs and online news sites in the morning. The average blog and online news site gets the most traffic on Mondays. The average blog usually gets the most traffic before 11 am Monday to Thursday.

Differences in Genders
If you’re targeting men, a higher percentage of men read blogs and online news sites in the evening hours.

Feedback By the Hour
The average blog usually get the most amount of feedback around 9am

Growing Links Organically
The average blog usually gets the most inbound links Monday & Thursday morning at around 7am.
By posting more than one article per day, you increase your chances of getting unique views and inbound links. As you increase the number of posts-per-day, the number of unique views per month also increases.

Social Networks

It’s important to know when the highest percentage of your audience is frequenting social networking sites. This way will get you maximum exposure when you share content. The data below will help you understand the timing and frequenting of Social Networking Users.

Facebook
1 post every 2 days will achieve the most likes on Facebook. The best sharing frequency on Facebook is at Noon and a little after 7pm. Most Facebook sharing is done on Saturdays.

Twitter
The best time to tweet (in hopes of getting re-tweeted) is in the afternoon and before 5pm. To get the most people to click through to your site, it’s best to tweet 1 to 4 times per hour. You can expect the highest click through rates (CTR’s) during midweek and weekends between Noon and 6pm.

Google+
Google+, also referred to as GooglePlus, is the new kid on the block. Because of this, neither I nor the experts have a solid year of data.  For now (until further research is completed), as a rule of thumb, the best practice would be to follow the same times as Facebook.

If you have any of your own tips on gaining more readership through optimal timing and SEO, please comment below.

Despite the fact that Google AdSense is known as one of easiest ways to earn revenue from a website, it is sometimes hard to convince your friends and family that with the right effort, niche and work there is potential to make a good living.

How much can someone earn from AdSense really?
To be realistic, it doesn’t happen overnight or without making scarifies, being knowledgeable about SEO, understanding best ad sizes and placement, having talent and time to write compelling original content and having some knowledge of website coding to tweak websites to keep traffic as search engines change algorithms or to make the website more user-friendly to retain the readers.

With hard work, however, one should be able to see AdSense revenue come in. At first, it will be enough to cover the cost of hosting, but as your site grows and visitors get retained, the income could be a decent amount, even enough to quit that day job.

Some publishers do get the formula right and we can study their sites for AdSense Tips.
Listed below are 10 top AdSense earners we can aspire to:

1. Mashable – Mashable is the top earner of AdSense. Its monthly page view is about 25 million. Its monthly AdSense earnings are around $600,000.

2. Weblogs, Inc. – Weblogs, Inc.’s portfolio consists of approximately 90 blogs. Their monthly page view is about 25 million. The AdSense revenue is on average $190,000 per month before getting aquired by AOL.com.

3. Digital Point – Digital point is one of the most popular forums on the Internet. This forum’s monthly revenue from AdSense is on average $500,000 a month.

4 . TechCrunch – Techcrunch’s monthly AdSense revenue is about $240,000.

5. Digg – Digg a social networking site, where people share and read news and other information. Its monthly AdSense revenue is about $250,000.

6. Perez Hilton – Perez Hilton’s founder Mario Lavandeirais is the top AdSense earner by blogging. Per blog earnings are around $200,000 per month.

7. Shoe Money – The founder of Shoe Money Jeremy Shoemaker earns about $140,000 from AdSense per month from various sites he owns.

8. Tweetmeme - Tweetmeme earns about $225,000 per month from AdSense with about 385,000 unique visitors per month.

9 . Plenty Of Fish – Plenty of Fish is a free dating site, which makes around $300,000 per month.

10. ClickIndia

- ClickIndia earns $85,000 per month. They have around 5.5 million unique users a month.

Please note all figures mentioned above are in USD.

WordPress Plugins many be Slowing Down Your Website Speed Load Time and Making You Rank Low in Google and Other Search Engines. We have taken the time to test popular plugins to see which ones are worth using and which ones should be reconsidered.

Website Speed is important when it comes to search engine optimization. Search engines rank sites that load faster better than slower sites.

Studies show that users leave a site if it hasn’t loaded in a timely matter; keep your users happy and engaged by providing a fast performing website!

I have taken one of my own WordPress website that has no content, comments, links or media and has a generic out of the box theme and tested it with GTmetrix which analyzed the speed as the following before any plugins were activated on a test server.

• Page load time in 0.92s,
• Total page size is 26.7KB
• Number of requests is:6
• Page Speed Grade  B 88%
• Yslow Grade: A 90%

One by one I will test different common wordpress plugins to see which plugins slow down a wordpress website and which increase the speed. I have highlighted the ones that were excellent in green font and the ones that failed miserably in red font – Please note this list will grow as I discover new plugins I want to test, so keep coming back to see my results. Also feel free to suggest other plugins I should test in the comments section below

Akismet 2.5.3 by Automattic
Load time increased to 1.17s

All In One SEO Pack 1.6.13.8 by Michael Torbert
Load time increased  to .097s

Cbnet Ping Optimizer 2.3.2 by Chip Bennett
Load time remained the same

Cross-Linker 1.4.1 by Jan Hvizdak
Load time increased to 1.05s

Force GZip 1.0.1  by Justin Shreve
Load time increased to 1.94s
Page speed grade increased to 89% B
YSlow grade increased to 91% A

LinkedIn Share Button 1.3 by John Blackbourn & Frank Prendergas
Load time increased to 1.04s

Delete Duplicated Posts 2.0.5 by CleverPlugins.com
Load time increased to 1.10s

JS & CSS Script Optimizer 0.2.2  by Evgeniy Kotelnitskiy
Load time increased to 3.47s

Robot Meta 3.3.1 by Joost de Valk
Load time increased to 1.00s

SEO Ultimate 2.4  by SEO Design Solution
Load time Increased to 1.48s

Share and Follow 1.54.1 by Andy Killen
Load time increased to 1.17s
Total page size increased to 198KB
Total number or request increased to 10
Page speed grade decreased to 86% B
YSlow grade decreased to 85% B

Sharebar 1.2.1 by Monjurul Dolon
Load time increased to  1.10s
Total page size increased to106KB
Total number of requests increased to 9
Page grade decreased to 85% B
YSlow grade decreased to 83% B

Slick Social Share Buttons 2.1.4  by Lee Chestnutt
Load time increased to .93s
NOTE – It passes on speed only if you put it on the home page and posts.
If you add it to pages, archived pages, category pages it fails.

Sociable 4.1.5 by Blogplay
Load time increased to  1.37s
Total page size increased to 79.3KB
Total number of requests increased to 12
Page grade decreased to 88% B
YSlow grade decreased to 79% C

Related Posts Thumbnails 1.3.1 by Maria Shldybina
Load time increased to 1.02s

WordPress SEO 1.0.3 by Joost de Valk
Load time increased to 1.53s

W3 Total Cache 0.9.2.4 by  Frederick Townes
Load time increased to 1.03s
YSlow grade increased to 91% A
NOTE:  The WordPress site tested above had no content.  Due to this I due to this decided to take a large WordPress site and see if W3Total Cache performed better. Here are the results

• Page load time in 7.38s, after W3T Cache ran it load time decreased to 4.76s
• Total page size is 261KB, after W3T Cache ran page size increased to 262KB
• Number of requests is:34, after W3T Cache ran page requested increased to 36
• Page Speed Grade  C 78%, after W3T Cache ran Page Speed Grade increased to 79%
• Yslow Grade: C 75%, after W3T Cache ran Yslow Grade increased to 77%

Google Panda Algorithm and other Search Engines look down and penalize any site that duplicates content on their site internally or from other sites. Make sure the content is 100 percent original and interesting. Don’t cut corners by taking an old article, or someone else’s article and changing it around with a new title and switching up the wording here or there. Search Engines have become so sophisticated they can tell when a writer has cut corners and will penalize the site dropping in ranking to removing the site all together from the search engine

Avoid duplicating content by accident, a basic mistake that can hurt ranking as well.

Basically anytime you or someone cuts and paste info from one place to another on the web you could be penalizing your website and search engine rankings. Be careful to always change the content when posting info that is too similar such as

• Your company is hosting an event and has a description on their website. To market the event your marketing department sent out a press release with the same wording, posted the same wording in community event calendars or posted in industry related forums
• Posting links in Social Media such as Facebook and they automatically posting a snippet of the content
• Posting contributed articles too similar to various websites

Search Engines such as Google are so frustrated by laziness of people who take shortcuts of duplicating content they now de-index websites, yes remove the sites completely from their search engine who have kept on publishing or not updating and removing duplicate content from their websites which clearly breaks the rules of Google Webmaster Guidelines. If a site gets removed by Google from their search engine it can be a very painstaking task to ask Google for reconsideration. The best way to make sure Google doesn’t remove your website or pages for duplicate content is to make 100 percent original interesting focused content and watch where you cut and paste on the web.

If you discover someone else is duplicating or copying your content

Theft of website content, from one website to another became an epic trend until Google started penalize for duplicate content. However some companies and websites are still getting away with it and Google hasn’t caught up to them. If you discover someone has duplicated or copied your content file a DMCA report with the violators’ hosting company to have their website taken down or have the duplicated content removed.

An excellent free tool to see who is duplicating your content or see if your own website has duplication violation use http://www.copyscape.com

Writing 2012 SEO friendly content is more important than ever for companies and websites that rely on traffic to increase leads or revenue this year

In 2011 Google’s famous Panda Algorithm changed the playing field for 2012 SEO copywriting and it is more important than ever to follow Google Webmaster Guidelines as being aware of how to write Search Engine Optimized Content.

To be successful anything that will get posted on the web, if it is an article, a product description, a calendar event, blog post, or a classified ad should be written to be search engine optimized.

Due to Search Engine Algorithms, writing styles have changed in 2011 and changed for good for 2012 onward and anyone who writes needs to be aware what will get their content ranked well in search engines and what will hinder their content from being found or penalized by search engines.

If you noticed over the last couple of years news papers and magazines have slowed down using catchy fun titles or long interludes to the stories. Their titles and first paragraphs of stories are keyword driven.  They try not to duplicate stories as much, and their grammar skills have tightened up.

To have 2012 SEO friendly content the following four items are important

• Avoid Thin Content, 400 Words or More – Search engines do not like anything under 400 words. They consider this thin content and will penalize sites that have pages with little to no wording
• Avoid Duplicate Content – In 2011 Google and other Search Engines cracked down on people duplicating content with in their site and from other sites. Search Engines have algorithms that are so sophisticated they can tell if an article has been duplicated slightly or completely and will penalize any site/company that does so.
• Using Keyword Phrases and placing them in specific locations. – Where traveling humans have street signs to understand where they are, likewise Search Engine Robots traveling sites determining how to index them by how the content is laid out, they need specific signs to asses where you fit in their search.
• Proper English – Search Engines got frustrated in 2011 and made algorithms that penalized sites for bad grammar and spelling.  Whoever writes the content, make sure they understand grammar structure and you spell check or Search Engines will penalize you.

• Use Google Keyword Tool to find which Topics and Keyword Phrases the content should focus on.  Choose well searched phrases that have low to medium competition.
• Determine who will be writing the SEO friendly content, yourself or a hired writer
• Give the assigned writer three to five friendly SEO Keyword Phrases which are highly searched with low to medium completion

Before the writing make sure the assigned writer understands repetition or keywords and not duplicating content.  This is very important for SEO friendly content to rank well in Google and other Search Engines. This will ensure search engines algorithms index the content better.

Keyword phrases should be repeated several times throughout the content in the following places

• In title  (at least two of the assigned key phrases, ideally used at the beginning of the content)
• First Sentence (at least two of the same phrases used in the title, ideally used at the beginning of the content)
• All Key phrases used minimum once, ideally twice in the first paragraph
• If anything is bold or italics make sure it has a key phrase
• In links if it flows with the content
• Summary paragraph at the end of the content.

For best SEO practices, webmaster or who is posting content on the web should use Keyword Phrases in the following area:

• in  naming the page /URL / Permalink
• used 2 Times in the meta title Tags which is also often the H1 tag
• used in Keyword Tags
• used in Description Tags
• used in H2 & H3 Tags
• used in Image alt text
• used  in naming image files
• used in links
• used in anchor texted
• used where phrases are bolded
• used where items are italics

 
Important SEO TIP – Webmaster or Marketing Department needs to remember to not duplicate the content accidently or intentionally

With following the above checklist will help improve  your website to get more traffic.