The web service Google Adsense will soon begin offering “interest-based advertising”. This addition “will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests”.

What does this mean to those of us who use Google Adsense on our websites and blogs?

Let’s understand what “interest-based advertising” is first. To quote the Google Adsense site, “Interest-based advertising enables advertisers to reach users based on their interests (e.g. ‘sports enthusiasts’), and allows them to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser websites. To complement interest-based advertising, the Ads Preferences Manager lets users view and edit their interest categories.”

The idea is to provide a greater level of focus and granularity for serving relevant ads to users. The technology behind this is called the “DoubleClick DART cookie“. As you browse websites in the AdSense network, Google stores an advertising cookie in your browser to understand the types of pages that you are visiting. This information is used to show ads based on interest categories that might appeal to you. If you don’t like the interest groups that Google has assigned, you can edit their list of interest categories within the Ads Preferences Manager.

Google has made it clear that the use of this technology is used in accordance with their privacy policy, stating “It is not used to identify users personally and we don’t show ads based on personal information. We also will not show ads based on sensitive information or interest categories, such as those based on race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or sensitive financial categories, without a user’s opt-in consent”.

Google is suggesting that website owners update their privacy policy to reflect the changes if you are using the Adsense to serve ads on your website.

For more information on Google interest-based advertising, check out this list of frequently asked questions.

Recommendations on updating your privacy policy can be found here.

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If you are just starting out in your online business venture, or you have been running your own site for a while, Google Webmaster Tools should be the one tool that you have in your arsenal of website analytics tools.

This website tool will let you analyze all of your web sites and help you to understand how Google sees your site as it exists today. Based on the information here, you can fine tune your web site to present it in the manner you desire.

To get started, you should visit the site and add one of your web sites to the list. You will then need to verify that you are the site owner. This verification is done in one of two ways; adding a specially named file to the root directory of your web site, or adding a meta tag into the HEAD section of your home page. If you have your own domain name, either option is easy. If you are running a blog on a site like Blogger, WordPress or Typepad, you will need to edit the template file that contains your HEAD tag information. In WordPress this is done by going into the dashboard for your blog, clicking ‘Presentation’, ‘Theme editor’, and editing the ‘header.php’ file. Just find the line that says BODY and insert the tag Google gives you just above this line.

Now you’re ready. When you visit the Webmaster Tools site again, you are greeted with the Dashboard. From here you can add and delete sites, manage site maps, and click through to more detailed reports about how your site is indexed. Once you select the site that you want more detail on, you are given a number of options to choose from; Diagnostics, Statistic, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

The Diagnostics are will tell you what problems Google encountered while crawling your website. These problems could include HTTP errors, pages that weren’t found or restricted, or just simply URLs that could not be reached. If you have pages optimized for mobile devices, you can view any issues with those pages as well. Google has recently added a Content Analysis option to his page as well to identify any issues they found with Page Titles or Meta descriptions or non-indexable content. Who says Google doesn’t care about Meta data?

In the Statistics area, Google will show you when your site was included in the search results, terms that returned your site and the position your site placed in that particular search on average. This is very valuable for determining what keywords your site is linked associated with.

This area will also show you Google’s take on your site. This is probably the most powerful part of the tool. You can see what words are used in links back to your site, the keywords Google has identified on your site, and the list of keywords on other sites that link to you. This is all very important to determining your Google Page Rank. You can see what your Google Page Rank is from the Crawl Stats link under Statistics. This will not be a number, but will be a subjective result based on Google Analysis.

Statistics will also show you your indexing stats link the pages indexed, names of sites that link to you, the cached page of your site, etc.

The Links area is pretty cool because it will show you a list of your web pages that other web sites have linked to. From there, you can drill down and see the exact URL of the pages that link to that page. You can also see how the internal page linking for your website is understood by Google.

In the Sitemaps area, you can manage and submit a sitemap for each of your web sites. This really helps Google in indexing your site, but is not a requirement. You can generate a Google Sitemap from the XML Sitemaps web site automatically, and then upload the files to your server. This might not be possible for bloggers use free blogging tools, but the Sitemaps tool is only an option and not a requirement for using Webmaster Tools.

The last area is the Tools section. Here, there are various tools that Google provides to help analyze the different aspects of your web site that are important to a crawler like the robots.txt file, your preferred domain reference, the geographic target of your web site, and more.

Each of tools and sections described come with online help and very clear descriptions of what each tool is doing and how to use it. The tools are easy to use and will help you learn a lot about how Google sees your web site and what you can do to help it place better in the search results.

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