Getting Started With Adsense

Here are some of the basics to getting starting with Google Adsense with WordPress. First, you will need a blog created with WordPress of course. The next step would be to sign up for Google Adense, but this might be a premature step to take. Here’s why. Google wants to provide ads to websites that meet certain criteria, such as that they have content. This content needs to be indexable, or, in other words lots of text for it to parse. There likely should be multiple pages of content. The content should span over time to show that the website is active. The website should be live for a while too.

My website had been up for several years, but I had not made many post to it for years. I had a decent amount of content at around 20 posts; however, this didn’t seem to matter for Google Adsense. As a result, my website was denied the first and second times I submitted it. Here is my second rejection email.

As mentioned in our welcome email, we conduct a second review of your AdSense application once AdSense code is placed on your site(s). We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below Insufficient content: To be approved for AdSense and show relevant ads on your site, your pages need to have enough text on them for our specialists to review and for our crawler to be able to determine what your pages are about. To resolve this issue, please work through the following suggestions: Make sure that your pages have sufficient text – websites that contain mostly images, videos or Flash animations will not be approved. Your content should contain complete sentences and paragraphs, not only headlines. Ensure that your website is fully built and launched before you apply for AdSense – do not apply while your site’s still in a beta or “under construction” phase or only consists of a website template. Place the ad code on a live page of your website. It does not have to be the main page, but test pages that are empty except for the AdSense ad code will not be approved. Provide a clear navigation system for your visitors so that they can easily find all of the sections and pages of your website. If you’d like to monetize YouTube videos, please apply for the YouTube monetization program. Note that blogs and websites that contain only videos will not be approved.

The reason isn’t crystal clear, but I felt it was safe to assume I needed to add some more posts. So, I spaced about 5 posts out over the course of a week. I made sure to try to follow good SEO practices, such as adding tags, metadata, descriptions for images, and to have posts with a few hundred words each. This seemed to do the trick, because the third time was a charm for me.

For this reason, I would suggest you post maybe 5-10 posts over time, maybe 1-4 weeks. This will give you a decent amount of content, show that your website is actively updated, and provide you with a website that has been around for more than a few seconds.

At this point, you should go sign up at Google Adsense and copy & paste the provided code into your website as described into your head tag on the main page of your website. Now, these instructions are for a WordPress site, where you should be using a theme. These themes have a file called “header.php”, which you will need to find and modify. You can find this file in your “wp-admin” part of your website under “Appearance” ? “Editor”. Then, I would suggest doing a “Ctrl + F” and searching for “header” to expedite finding the file. The following images show an example of the code from Google Adsense, where to find the “header.php” file, and editing the “header.php” file.

Afterwards, you are ready to have Google Adsense review your website. With any luck, you will soon get a congratulations email telling you that your website has been approved. It will provide you a page to check the status and tell you that it will take up to 3 days to review; however, I believe it never took more than 1-2 days to get feedback. With WordPress, you may want to use a plugin to manage your ads; however, but you should start seeing ads on your website. Google Adsense can be configured to allow for responsive ads, but regardless, it seems it knows where to intelligently place ads within a WordPress site with just that simple bit of HTML code inside the head tags. For instance, you may see ads in the header, footer, and side par sections, as well as, correctly placed between posts or between paragraphs within a post.

In a future post, we will discuss Google Analytics with WordPress.