A secret few advertising designers know is that graphic that will get most attention is a picture of a human face. People are genetically predisposed to look at a human face in their view area. Try it yourself while you're browsing web. If a webpage has a human face on it, that's first thing you will look at.

Where to position ads on your webpage

To discuss where to place ads on a webpage, we need to divide a page into five sections as listed below.

1. Header 2. Footer 3. Left Margin 4. Right Margin 5. Center column

Note: There is a sixth area of webpage which is popup window. There are many forms of popup windows; pop-over, pop-under, delayed, and exit. The polite way to use popup windows is self-closing popup window. Because of popup window blockers, popup windows are much less effective today, and, from my own experience, when I tried using popup windows, page views on my website dropped by 50 percent.

The most common position to place advertising banners is in header section of a webpage. Web users have programmed themselves to ignore banners in this position. The response rate of banners in header section of webpages has dropped to something like .0001 percent. The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has tried to overcome this problem by defining giant (what I call "battleship size") banners. I don't know of any studies that show this works.

Using banners in head section of your webpage is a waste of processor time, but most webpages still use them. Making a sale this way is a long shot. Banners in footer section of a webpage are even less responsive.

Actually Web users have programmed themselves to ignore all advertising on web. However, from my own experience, you can get some response from ads in left and right margins of a webpage. Most websites are designed with menu in left margin and possibly ads in right margin. This means if user has a low resolution display, depending upon width of webpage, advertising may be off screen.

Place your menu in right margin and use left margin for advertising. This places user with a low resolution display in positon of having to scroll to view menu. Too bad. They should get a bigger display. Website revenue comes first.

The most responsive position to put your ads is in center column of webpage along with content. As visitors are reading article on webpage, they come upon ad. It's unavoidable.

If you imagine center column of your webpage divided into three parts; top, middle, and bottom, most responsive position for your ad will be right in middle. As visitors are reading article on webpage, they are forced to look at ad as they continue to lower part of article. This might be a little annoying to reader, but let's hope your content is worth that slight annoyance.

I would recommend placing your ad at bottom of center column. As visitors read article on webpage, they end up looking at your ad. This is almost as effective as placing ad in middle of column, and a lot less annoying to reader.

As you can see, how you integrate advertising into your webpages has a major impact on your ability to produce revenue from your website. Poor ad integration will cause visitors to click away. Proper integration can make your website highly profitable. But, ad positon is not only determining factor, don't forget ratio of ads to content, ad management, and ad type relative to response rate.

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Once you have added all keywords in right pane which are applicable for your site, click on next keyword in left pane which is applicable for your site. Once again, WordTracker will display a list of keywords in right pane which contain keyword you had clicked on in left pane. Again, copy keywords in right pane which are applicable for your site and paste them in first column of your spreadsheet. Also, copy figures present in Count column and paste them in second column beside corresponding keywords. Repeat this process for each of keywords in left pane.

Step 5: Once you have finished with all keywords in left pane, press your browser's Back button a number of times until WordTracker again displays text box which asks you to type in a keyword. Type in second keyword in your original list (i.e. "travel to Australia"), click on "Proceed >>" button and repeat Step 4. Do this for each of keywords that you developed in Step 1.

Step 6: Go to AltaVista. Search for first keyword that is present in your spreadsheet using exact match search (i.e. you should wrap keyword in quotes, i.e. you should type a quotation mark before typing keyword and a quotation mark after typing it). AltaVista will return number of sites which are relevant to that keyword. Add this number to third column of spreadsheet in same row in which keyword is present. Repeat this process for each of keywords present in your spreadsheet. Once you have done that, your first column will contain keywords, your second column will show popularity of keywords and your third column will contain number of sites you are competing against to get a high ranking for those keywords.

Now it's time to calculate KEI!

Step 7: The Keyword Effectiveness Index is square of popularity of a keyword multiplied by 1000 and divided by number of sites which appear in AltaVista for that keyword. It is designed to measure which keywords are worth optimizing your site for. Higher KEI, better keyword. How formula for KEI is arrived at is beyond scope of this article. If you want to know, send a blank email to mailto:kei@1stSearchRanking.com

If you had used spreadsheet file that I created for you (see Step 2), you won't need to enter formula for calculating KEI yourself. The KEI would be automatically calculated for you moment you enter values in columns 2 and 3. You can go straight to Step 8.

In case you didn't download file, here's how you can calculate KEI.

I am assuming that you have created spreadsheet columns in way I recommended in Step 3 and that you are using Microsoft Excel. If you using some other spreadsheet program, you will need to adjust formula to requirements of your spreadsheet program. Click on cell D2. Type in following exactly as it is shown:

=IF(C2<>0,B2^2/C2*1000,B2^2*1000)

Then click on Copy button to copy formula, select all cells in column 4 which have keywords associated with them and press Paste button to paste formula. The KEI for each keyword will be displayed.

Step 8: Use your spreadsheet program's Sort feature to sort rows in descending order of KEI. In Excel 97, you would click on Data menu, click on Sort menu item, choose KEI from drop-down combo box named "Sort by", click on "Descending" option next to it, and then click on OK.

And guess what - that's it! You now know keywords which you should optimize your site for. You can now start optimizing your site one by one for each keyword, starting with keyword with highest KEI. Exactly how many of keywords you choose to optimize your site for largely depends on amount of time that you can spare from your normal business activities. But whatever number of keywords that you target, it obviously makes sense to go for most effective keywords first.

Tying up loose ends:

The number of related keywords that WordTracker displays in trial version is limited. In order to get all keywords which are related to keywords you had developed in Step 1, you would need to subscribe to WordTracker's paid service. We highly recommend that you do subscribe to WordTracker's paid service as otherwise, you will miss out on a lot of keywords that can prove to be extremely valuable to you.