Google AdSense has added the ability for publishers to target their AdSense ads to the content they think best suits their site so ads shown on their sites should only show relevant AdSense ad units.

Many sites have a lot of recurring content: headers, menu, footers and anything else you might find on every page of a site.

This can cause problems for your SERPs (diluting your keyword rich content) and the relevancy of your AdSense ads.

For example this site has a variety of content including a few posts about the World of Warcraft Gold and Leveling guides and I see a lot of ads that match this content on pages that have nothing to do with this content.

This is mainly caused by the links in the menu, those pages make me money through ClickBank and so I want links to them.

If someone comes to my site looking for AdSense templates and sees ads selling World of Warcraft gold on pages not about World of Warcraft they are highly unlikely to click those AdSense ads!

So being able to tell AdSense what part of a page should be used to create an ad unit is a great feature that should increase the relevancy of AdSense ads dramatically.

How to Target your AdSense Ads

Google AdSense has supplied some HTML code-

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->

Place your relevant keyword rich content here

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Use this code within the body of the page (so no need to add it to your title) and the content within will be used to generate your AdSense Ad units.

AdSense have also supplied a way to exclude content as well-

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->

Content to be ignored, for example a menu with a lot of irrelevant links (irrelevant to the main content).

<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

I see two obvious ways of using this code automatically rather than on the fly page by page (I’m lazy, don’t fancy adding this code one page at a time :-)).

1. Use the first code around the main content, for example a blog page (like you are reading now) may be from the header (“Targeting AdSense Ads”) to the comment header below. This would then only include the main content of this post ignoring the title of the blog, menu, comments and footer content.

2. Use the second code around the header, menu, footer and other non main content so only the main content is considered by AdSense.

Since I make a lot of money from Google AdSense and many of my pages do not show relevant ads I plan to convert everything I own to use this code.

For example the WordPress SEO/AdSense templates I sell at Google AdSense Templates have this code added to all WordPress themes for sale.

This should result in highly targeted/relevant AdSense ads on the websites of the customers who buy my templates (all past customers received an update for free) and of course for the sites I use the themes on (I use it on this site for example, view source to see).