They tap in their keyword i.e. fish tanks and Google brings up what it thinks are the most relevant web-sites. Now, if you are a web-site owner you really want your results to be included in the top half of page one on the left. There is a very good reason for this because around 50% of people always click on the top left hand corner.



If you've seen the Google Heat Map the colours of the heat map show where a user looks on the page. The red/orange/yellow areas are where a user looks the most and the dark blue areas are where a user looks least. As the maps shows it is the top ten natural search results which get the most attention.

A purple cross marks where a user makes a click and again, the top natural positions get the most attention from the users and the highest number of clicks. The map confirms that you have to be visible in the natural results in order to benefit from the greatest volume of visitors.

You will be pleased to know that is what our long term strategy is all about, to be the site that is in the red zone for our chosen keyword.

But just for a moment, let us pretend we have a web-site and we want some quick traffic. One of the main options open to us is to buy that traffic, probably for so much per click. Where would I go to? Probably Google Adwords, the largest seller of advertising space in the market.

When you make a search on Google, those are their ads on the right hand side in your search results. Do not worry too much about them at the moment because we will cover Adwords in great detail in a later module. For now, I am just trying to explain how all this works. So, let us say I go along to Google Adwords and want to purchase some visitors who are searching for fish tanks.

I would create an ad for fish tanks, decide how much I want to bid for the keyword and within hours my ad would be appearing in the right hand column. But this is also where Google Adsense comes in, because Adsense allows other sites, your sites, to display those Google Ads and receive a slice of the cake.

In truth, Google keeps the biggest slice, around 70%, but enough 30 per cents can quickly add up, especially if we are not having to do any work for it. Remember, some keywords can pay upwards of $5 PER click. To be honest, I don't think the big money of old is still their to be made with Google Adsense.

One of the major reasons is that Google now gives advertisers the opportunity to pay a different rate for ads on their search network, as against the ads they show on your sites. Invariably, advertisers choose to pay a lot lower rate and as a consequence, you as the publisher, get the same cut from a much smaller pie.

Having said all this, Adsense is a 'must have' in every Internet Marketer's kitbag and I certainly make it a core part of any Internet Marketing strategy, either as a user or a publisher, there are some big numbers to be made, as long as you know what you are doing.