Adsense revolutionized world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on number of visitors you attract to your site, so number of “banner impressions” dictate revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is number of visitors that actually click on advertising that determine how much you earn.

There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.

Google really has taken web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google’s adsense success is largely thanks to fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was best thing they could do.

This is especially true if you are using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web design package such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver. These programs will speed up your web site creation, but they are not that efficient at writing clean html code.

We will be focusing this discussion on actual html coding, ignoring other programming languages that may be used in a page such as JavaScript. In code examples I will be using ( and ) characters instead of correct html so that code examples will display properly in this newsletter.

Up until recently when coding a page in HTML we would be using tags such as (font) tag and (p) paragraph tags. Between these tags would be our page content, text, images and links. Each time a formatting change was made on page new tags were needed with complete formatting for new section. More recently we have gained ability to use Cascading Style Sheets, allowing us to write formatting once and then refer to that formatting several times within a web page.

In order to speed up page load times we need to have fewer characters on page when viewed in an html editor. Since we really do not want to remove any of our visible content we need to look to html code. By cleaning up this code we can remove characters, thereby creating a smaller web page that will load more quickly.

Over time HTML has changed and we now have many different ways to do same thing. An example would be code used to show a bold type face. In HTML we have two main choices, (strong) tag and (b) tag. As you can see (strong) tag uses 5 more characters than (b) tag, and if we consider closing tags as well we see that using (strong)(/strong) tag pair uses 10 more characters than cleaner (b)(/b) tag pair.

This is our First Principle of clean HTML code: Use simplest coding method available.

HTML has ability of nesting code within other code. For instance we could have a line with three words where middle word was in bold. This could be accomplished by changing formatting completely each time visible formatting changes. Consider this code:

(font face=”times”)This(/font) (font face=”times”)(strong)BOLD(/strong)(/font) (font face=”times”)Word(/font) This takes up 90 characters.