One of the easiest ways to make money online is to put adsense on your blog. It's free to sign up and you get paid when people click your ads. How easy is that? The hard part is getting traffic to your site and even harder is getting the right traffic. Let me explain...

You can create a blog, put up adsense, and then promote yourself through all the web 2.0 social media outlets of which there are hundreds. You can do this and get lots of traffic. But is it really going to help you make money online?

The people that browse sites like Digg are pretty internet savvy people. They most likely have their own blogs with adsense on them. When was the last time you went to Digg to answer a question, clicked on a site, clicked on their ads, and then bought whatever product the ad was promoting? My guess is, you've never done that. If you haven't done that then why would you assume that anyone else would do that?

Getting traffic is only half of the equation, the easier half. Getting keyword targeted traffic is the most important part of trying to make money with adsense and you can do this by optimizing your site for certain key words and their long tails.

A key word long tail is the words that surround your main target keyword. Say if you were targeting 'make money online' then your long tails would be phrases like 'how to make money online, how to make money online for beginners, free guide to making money online, make money online with adsense, etc.' It is important to have a blog rich with long tails because they are easier to rank well for since their is less competition for them. When you start to rank well for you long tails it will also help your ranking for you main keyword.

The reason that you want targeted traffic as opposed to social traffic is because social traffic does not convert. If you are trying to make money with adsense then you want the highest click through rate (CTR) that you can possibly get. Other bloggers aren't going to click your ads because they know there are no answers on the other site of that link and because they have been trained not to click their own adsense. On top of you wanting a high CTR you also want the people clicking on your ads to buy whatever is on the other side. Social traffic is more than useless, it can actually hurt your adsense earnings. Google's highest priority is the advertiser because this is who is paying them. If you are sending the advertiser a bunch of traffic that doesn't convert then they aren't going to pay the amount that they bid for the ads. The less money the advertisers pay G the less money you are going to get. So rather than getting dollars per click you are going to get pennies per click because all because of your untargeted traffic.

On top of optimizing your site for key word targeted traffic these same techniques will get you the highest paying ads for your content and will help you avoid the dreaded public service ads (PSA) and the blogging ads. If you are getting random ads that have nothing to do with you site and on your ad box it says public service ad then you are getting anywhere between 1 - 3 cents per click. The way to avoid this is to optimize your blog's content for specific keywords and their long tails. That way the G bots will know exactly what ads to put for your niche. This is called on page optimization.

On page optimization is only about ten to twenty percent of the whole search engine optimization (SEO) game but it is the most important part of getting good ads that will pay you well. One big reason that most people fail in the 'make money online' world is because they are chasing social traffic. We already discussed some of the reasons why this is a huge waste of time but there are on page implications as well. If you are wanting people actually read what you have to say then you are probably writing cute and witty post titles that don't have you keyword and don't really succinctly explain what you post is going to be about. This is fine if you want people to read your post but it is not going to make you any money. The reason you aren't going to make money by writing witty posts is that the G bots aren't going to know what your post is about. The G spiders aren't smart, they can't tell that you are a great writer, they only search for keywords for placing targeted ads and for ranking for the relevancy of your content in their search engine page rankings (SERPs).

It seems like a nightmare future dystopian cyber world but if you want to make money online then you are going to have to take into account the G bots. I'm not saying write gibberish that people can't read with keywords in between. But you are going to have to take into account the way the Google algorithm ranks pages. Even if you only want readers, you probably want a lot of them, and the best way to get a lot of readers is to rank well in Google. Using your keyword in your post titles is important.

But if you use your keywords in your URL, your blog title, subtitle, sidbars, post titles, content, and footers then the G bots will know exactly what keywords to rank you for and what ads to put on your pages to make you the most money possible.

Farther down the page I'm going to talk about the most important part of search engine optimization, off page SEO, which is the key to ranking well with G and making money online.

While on page optimization is very important it is relatively easy to do because you have control over all aspects of your page's creation. On the other hand off page search engine optimization is harder, takes more time, and you don't have a whole lot of control.

There is a lot of mystery that surrounds off page SEO and a lot of it is just a waste of time. The only thing you should really be concerned with is getting back links. This is where someone else on their blog puts a link to your blog. We'll go over the ways to get back links in a second but first I want to talk about the difference in the quality of back links.

All backlinks are not created equal. A one way back link has more juice than a two way link. A link from a high page rank irrelevant site is not as good as a link from a slightly lower PR site that is relevant. A side bar link is not as good as a link from inside a relevant article.

The best backlink you could possibly get, though this is impossible for all intents and purposes, would be from a PR10 site that is in your same niche with a link from inside a relevant article with a relevant keyword anchored backlink. On the other end of the scale the worst back link would be a two way backlink from an irrelevant site from the side bar or link list. Everything else is somewhere in between.

So if you and me are competing for a ranking in the same niche and I get 1000 links from a bunch of irrelevant sites and you get 1 or 2 good quality key word anchored backlinks from high PR sites you are going to rank higher than me in the SERPs. This is because as G sees it, if there are high PR sites linking to your content then you must be a trusted authority for whatever your keyword is.The key is to get other people to link to your site using relevant terms inside posts. If your niche is the 'how to make money online' niche then you want people to use those keywords and similar to link to you as opposed to a link from 'click here.' A 'click here' link is useless for getting yourself higher in the SERPs.

What are some of the ways you can get backlinks?

The first, easiest, and cheapest way to get quality backlinks is to write good quality articles so that other people in your niche will re publish them on their sites and give you a back link. I'm going to tell you a tip to make sure that you get the keyword anchored backlink you want from this method and it's easy and you control it. It's so simple, just put your own keyword anchored back link in your own article, but the trick is to put it in the first paragraph. That way if someone only posts a snippet of your article you will still get the exact backlink to the exact page you want. This brings me to another tip. Don't just link to your homepage. This doesn't look organic to G, you want to make your links look as natural as possible. So link to articles deep in your blog. If you have internal links within your pages then the juice will eventually reach your homepage.

If you want to hurry the process along then you can write your own articles, hubs, lens, and link to yourself. This is a lot of work but it doesn't cost any money so if you are running on a shoestring this is the way to go although it does take a lot of time. Remember the importance of using relevant keyword anchored backlinks. This is key. This is what the G spiders are going to rank your site for so link carefully.

A more expensive and dangerous method is to buy backlinks. There are lots of places that broker back links. This is costly though and if Google finds out they might de index your page so tread carefully.

You can also join back link communities. These communities use high page rank blogs so that community members can put one way links to themselves.

These are the most common ways of getting backlinks which are the key if you want to make money online.