adsense hints

What is the status of adsense hints?

[kreagh]

I'm an adsense newbie who has just been approved & I'm trying to get some control over the ads that appear on my site. I heard about 'hint' code that can be inserted in the adsense code. Has this feature been implemented & can a newbie like me with no sales yet use it?

Or perhaps theres another way to control the ads that appear on my pages. For instance, I have a page on 'abstract art', but get ads for 'lease abstract' (which I guess are types of loans for cars & things). Because my site is so graphical, I don't have alot of content to nudge ads...mostly just url & keywords in tags.

I've downloaded preview tool & will look at that, but any help anyone can give would be appreciated. I'm actually pretty excited about this.

[Jenstar]

"hints" is by permission-only and used in specific targeting issues.

Start running your ads first, then see if you need to tighten relevancy. You will probably find most of your pages are perfectly targeted if ad inventory is not an issue.

[novice]

Section Targeting
[google.com...]

[hunderdown]

Add meaningful captions or descriptions or commentary to your pages to increase the amount of text.

[roycerus]

* Make sure you have keywords in the URL and the <title> tag.
* Add alt text to the images to describe the image.
* Add comments - wherever possible. [as hunderdown suggested]
* Use headers like <h1><h2> for main topic of the pages.
* Use the section targeting code [as novice suggested]

This should get your ads targeted.

[kreagh]

Thanks for the helpful comments. I've pretty much done many of the things you've all mentioned, except effective use of captions (that I will definetly pay more attention to), and didn't even know about section targeting...thanks!

Most of the link unit ads that come up have been right on, except for the one on 'lease abstract'.

Oh well...rinse & repeat

[sirkei]

table or div trick to push your content up the code.