Probably the most effective way to ensure the crawlers read the keywords
you want to emphasize though is to use Section Targeting. This is a fantastic technique. By simply inserting a couple of lines of HTML code into your Web page, you can tell the crawler which parts of your site are the most important and ensure that you get ads relevant to that content.
The lines you want to use to emphasize particular sections of your Web page
are:
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Section text.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
The rest of the page won’t be ignored, but those particular lines will receive a heavier weighting. If you want to tell the crawlers to ignore particular sections, you can use these lines:
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
Section text.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
You can highlight (and de-emphasize) as many or as few sections as you wish, but what you can’t do is use these instructions solely to highlight keywords. So you can’t put them around particular single words or phrases on your page and hope to see ads that relate only to those terms.
In fact, Google recommends that you highlight a sizeable portion of text — as much as 20 percent — for the targeting to be most effective. The result of targeting small amounts of text could be irrelevant ads, public service ads... or even a banning if you deliberately tried to bring up ads that have nothing to do with your site.
Section Targeting is probably most useful if you have a Web page that covers lots of different topics. So if you had a blog about MP3 players but had written an article about rap music for example, you could use Section Targeting to ensure that you didn’t lose ads about the music players to ads about rap music. Or you could tell the crawlers to ignore your readers’ comments and focus on your own entries.
And presumably, there’s nothing wrong with stuffing a paragraph with keywords related to your subject and telling the crawlers to focus on that section to ensure that your ads stay targeted.
It’s definitely something that you want to play with.
If there’s one problem with Section Targeting though, it’s that it can take up to two weeks before you see the results — the time it can take for the crawler to re-visit your page. So it’s not a fast process and that can make it a bit of a blunt tool. But it’s not blunt enough to be ignored.
