Question regarding adsense and relevancy

[kellyandsummer]

We have a homepage that is made up of images with text built into them, but for the most part, very little page text, except copyright info, etc. Therefore, I'm assuming this is the reason for the ridiculously irrelevant adsense ads appearing on our page. My question is, without changing the visuals of the page, can I just change the meta tags or alt tags to get more targeted ads, or does adsense rely on page text only?

[incrediBILL]

try putting the text content of the images into the ALT text tag of the image, then it's not on your page exactly but it does give the search engine something to chew on.

[europeforvisitors]

Just remember the purpose of alt tags. Remember, too, that:

1) Visually handicapped users with screen readers won't appreciate lengthy alt text; and...

2) In theory (and maybe in practice), stuffing alt text with keywords could affect your search rankings.

In my experience, the best way to make photo galleries work with AdSense is to use descriptive pages titles and captions. (My CPMs with photo pages are usually pretty bad, though--about a quarter of the site's average and a fraction of what I earn from some pages and subdirectories.)

[kellyandsummer]

Google wrote back and let me know that for adsense, their robots only read text, not alt or meta tags.

[euripydes]

My experience mirrors Europeforvisitors' -- my images all have captions, and I get (reasonably) relevent adsense ads. Still a low CTR compared to text-based sites, though.

[Powdork]

I would recommend keeping the adsense code and the text (caption) near each other in the pages' code.

[mafew]

I'd say give the alt description a go and see if it makes any difference. The google representative that emailed you may be wrong.

I've found that the content inbetween header tags, such as h1, usually influence google ads the most.