Steps for creating your own Adsense article website - the key basics

Article websites earning money from the Adsense program are very popular these days. Whilst it is quite simple to setup and add to an article based website, there are a number of small points that should be follow to make you Adsense article website a success.

This isn’t written for a complete beginner, and I am assuming a fair amount of knowledge. None of these items is an “Adsense secret” : It is all just common sense. Each item on its own is not very important, but by ticking every box, you give your article website its best possible start in life. If you don't understand something, then either skip it, or do a Google Search!

1. Tell nobody what you are doing. This discourages inorganic visitors and invalid clicks. Never click on ads appearing on your site, never do it from a friend’s house, never tell friends/family about your site, you do not want them visiting/clicking on your ads, they are inorganic traffic, and they are invalid clickers and also spoil your ecpm figures. Keep it quiet. Use your router to ban access to the site from kids/wife computers.
2. Buy a domain with your keywords in  e.g. potato-facts.com. Buy your domain at the earliest opportunity. Hyphens to separate words, but not too many or it looks spammy.
3. Host the domain somewhere you have control, and that ideally you are paying for, not on a “mates” server. Admittedly it is easy to move servers these days. The domain must be purchased yourself and you maintain access to its control panel. Unless you are planning something very bizarre, a simple lamp hosting is more than enough. Ideally you need to be able to tweak the .htaccess, but that is becoming less important these days.
4. A simple articles driven site does not need to be written in PHP, or ASP, have a database backend, CMS,  or anything else clever: Static html files are foolproof.
5. Setup the email to redirect to your normal address, and only use the @newddomain email address on the site.
6. Setup the .htaccess file to correct caps errors, and enforce the www with a 301 redirect
7. Make sure the .htaccess is doing server side includes (SSI) with the html file extension you wish to use
8. Apply for a Google account, and get an adwords account to access the keyword checker
9. Read the Google webmaster guidelines for Design and Content.  Also read the technical guidelines, quality guidelines, and image guidelines. Do nothing even remotely grey in these rules. They are not guidelines, they are irrevocable laws of the internet.
10. Setup with Google analytics. Get the tracking code in your website footer as an SSI in the DM template.
11. Design the site, use ccs/dhtml menus, or just a static list, get the menu code below the main content in the source code. Main body text on white with black text. Use DM to handle the syncing and ftp. Title text in <p> not <h>. Tables are strictly for tables of information, all other layout should be with div/css
12. Make sure you set up a distinctive favicon.
13. Use SSI to mange menus and ad code and analytics code, use Dreamweaver templates over this.
14. Write a dozen new articles, paying attention to the cost per click in the keyword tool and publish these all at once, paying keyword attention to title tag, h1 tag, body content ( properly broken with h2/3),  meta description tag, image alt text, anchor text to other articles on the site, title and alt attribute of tags, especially links.
15. Do NOT have masses and masses of code above the h1+main content in the html source, get the h1+body as close to the top of the source as possible.
16. Save the files with keywords in the name. E.g. Potatos-turn-green-sunlight.html is a good name. Update the canonical / base meta tags and NEVER change the filename, if you can help it, if you must, then do a 301 in the .htaccess AND keep both files on the server with a common canonical.
17. Folder names , if you use them, have keywords e.g.  /potato-articles/
18. Always use hyphens to separate words in file names and folder names and domain names
19. Create a privacy policy that codes the Adsense terms, do a copyright page as well if you like.
20. Give a good way of contacting the web master by email.
21. Publish the website. Let no content on the site before now.
22. Note: No Adsense yet – leave this off until a few weeks after go-live.
23. Get an article on some other website that links to your website with good anchor text. This could be one of your other websites, or a friend’s website etc. It could just be your blog site. Beware that a lot of blog sites automatically NOFOLLOW all links, so make sure this doesn’t happen!
24. Wait for Google to spider / index your site. Do not bother “submitting” your site.
25. Start adding regular content, e.g. 2 articles a week. Google likes regular content additions
26. Once you get to about 20 articles, I think it is safe to apply to the Adsense program and they ought to accept your site. I don’t know their policy for new sites, but this approach sounds sensible to me.
27. Place the Adsense code into the SSI files  - links and titles in blue on a white background, rectangles in the text, with or without wrap. Keep the Adsense well clear of any images.
28. Then link your Adsense account to your Google analytics account.
29. Keep adding regular content. Never duplicate something else you have written, or something from another site.
30. Play in Google webmaster tools , add a sitemap etc.
31. Do not buy links. Do not try plugging the site in emails, social networking, social bookmarking or forums for six months. Or never. Let visitor growth and backlinks  grows as organically as possible. The key is organic growth – the best converting and healthiest traffic is visitors from search engine results
32. If you don’t know what half the words in this list mean, look them up on Google!
33. Keep an eye on site: and link: searches.
34. Check periodically for duplicate content around the web
35. Check all your pages’ ads occasionally for public service ads
36. Do not visit your own web pages more often than is necessary for maintain the site... some adds are Pay Per Impression and you are costing advertisers money visiting your own site.
37. Do not waste  endless hours fiddling with existing articles or layout, checking stats etc. At least three quarters of the ongoing time you spend on your site should be for new content creation.  Do not wear out the F5 key on the Adsense earnings overview screen.
38. The average webmaster will do anything to avoid generating new content. Welcome to the world of homework avoidance. If you read some whizzy new SEO tip that you want to spend the afternoon implementing, force yourself to write a new article BEFORE you start the “fiddling with SEO” job.
39. Remember – most people looking for information on the internet are trying to solve a problem, so focus your articles so that they look like they are solving people’s problems.”Stop burnt potatoes forever” is a better title than “Effect of temperature on potato cooking rates”
40. Try not to start 20 new sites at once. With a life and full time job, it is hard to kick  off more than 1 new site a year.