One of the fastest ways to earn money online is through the Google AdSense program. You can sign up for a freely hosted website or blog, write some keyword-rich content, plug your AdSense codes to it, drive targeted traffic to it, and start earning within minutes. Wouldn't that be great! Let's examine the various ways you can increase your AdSense earnings.

1. Placement of AdSense ads block

Some AdSense ads block placement strategies have proven to be better earners than others. A well designed AdSense block which fits the style and layout of your website or blog can substantially increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) and your earnings. Which of the high CTR block formats you choose to display on your site would depend on the layout and color of your site. However, three formats stand out as real earners:

• the 160 x 600 skyscraper with text ads, placed on the left or right side of the page. It has been proved that placing the ads on the right side yields more clickthrus than than left side. This is attributable to the fact that more people are right-handed than left-handed - the 336 x 280 rectangle with text ads, placed on top or at the middle of the page. - the small square with text ads, placed immediately below your forum avatar (where it is allowed).

2. Color of the AdSense ads

The color of your AdSense ads is an important aspect of your site CTR. Using the right colors that blend the ads with the color of your page will make the ads appear as though they are part and parcel of your page content. In genral, using the right colors tends to increase the CTR of your AdSense ads. Be reminded though that it is against Google policy to trick the visitor in any way into clicking on your ads.

3. Using high paying keywords as page content

Most AdSense publishers tend to ignore this important aspect of earning power. When writing the content of your webpages, it is important to use high valued and rich keywords. This way, you are sure that the AdSense ads with high paying keywords will appear on your pages. Hence, you will earn more for each click. Be careful though not to overload your pages with the keywords as that may be considered as spam by the search engines, and may attract some penalty. A generally agreed keyword density is 3%.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A SEO-friendly website helps to boost the site's rankings, traffic deliverability and your overall earning potentials. You should therefore ensure that the following elements of your website are properly done SEO-wise:

• Page title: use a short but very descriptive title for your site as this is one of the first things search engines see when they crawl your site. - Meta tag and meta title: use these to define and indicate the contents of your web pages. - Site map: Create a site map file to let Google know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. - Robot text file: Create a Robot.txt file which allows you to hide files or directories that you don't wish the search engine spiders to find. This is an often overlooked but very effective SEO method. - Navigation: It is generally known that a navigation menu that is placed on the left side is more effective than the traditional top menu bar.

5. Google AdSense costume search box

You can place Google's search box right on your website. This way, you are not only giving your visitors a convenient way of searching Google right on your site, but also gives you an opportunity to earn money through any click generated by the users on AdSense ads displayed on the search engine results page (SERP). It's really like having your own Google search site and getting paid for searches performed on it.

6. Google AdSense ad links

Google recently added this feature to the AdSense income potentials. Using relevant keywords to determine the content of your pages, Googlebot is able to insert a couple of different ad links as part of your page content. You earn when visitors click on the ad links. Ordinarily, most visitors would not be able to distinguish the links from other page content, thereby increasing your chances of getting more clicks on those ads.

7. Targeted traffic

Having successfully implemented the above six steps, the last but in no way the least is to drive targeted traffic to your site. Naturally, the more traffic your site gets, the higher the CTR will be.

Note that not all traffic will convert into clicks, but only quality targeted traffic is what increases CTR. This is because these visitors are already looking for the information offered by the AdSense ads displayed on your site. These visitors have used the keywords/phrases you have used as content for your pages to land on your site. They are more likely to click on AdSense ads, thus increasing your earnings.