If you’re a Google AdSense publisher, you’ve noticed that a few weeks ago the Terms and Conditions for this service have been updated.

Quite a few things changed, but one of the most important updates is that you are required now to have a privacy policy on each website of yours which uses Google AdSense.

From Inside AdSense blog:

We’ve also added some specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers’ use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

To make your life easier, I’m going to share a useful tip: you don’t have to invent a policy yourself, cause it’s already done. In fact, there’s a WordPress plugin which creates a simple privacy policy you can then insert into any of your blog pages: Synclastic Privacy Policy Plugin.

Once you download the plugin, simply activate it and create a new WordPress page. Just insert this tag wherever you want your policy to appear:

<!– privacy-policy –>

That’s it! Really simple. Great plugin.

I’ve just done this here on PerfectBlogger, so my privacy policy is found under http://www.perfectblogger.com/privacy page.

See also:

• Jim Carter has a great overview of all the recent AdSense Terms & Conditions updates
• Synclastic Privacy Policy Plugin

Just when I have almost given up on the broken Adsense Notifier script, it got updated and fixed! You can download the latest version here: Adsense Notifier.

The current version is 0.9.6, and it once again shows all the Adsense earnings in the toolbar of my Firefox.

Adsense Notifier is one of the most useful extensions for me, because it saves me the effort of regularly checking the status of my Adsense account (which is a very bad habit – wastes a lot of time). Simply configure the settings to your likings, and all your vital Adsense stats will be automatically downloaded and delivered to your statusbar. Incredibly useful!

Manage new ads

Any AdSense units you’re going to create are automatically added to the list of managed ones, so by going to the AdSense Setup -> Manage Ads menu of your AdSense control panel you’ll be able to access the list of such ads. You can click and edit any one of them.

Manage old ads

Any existing ads of yours will continue to work, but if you want to simplify their management, you’ll have to convert them. Again, you do this once, and then enjoy the benefits every time you’re changing something about your ads.

See also:

• New Ad Management Overview

• Why You SHOULD Use AdSense on Your Blog
• Why AdSense Might NOT be Best For Your Blog

How Google Adwords suggests you new keywords

When you start an Adwords campaign, you specify a list of keywords you think is relevant, and then perhaps use the provided keyword tool to expand this list. That’s the typical approach. But wait, there’s more.

Most often, users get to see your ad in a sidebar of Google ads added to the Google SERP (search results page). So people use certain words for their search, and then Google decides which ads are most relevant. Sometimes your ad is shown there as well. The search term used by a user doesn’t necessarily match any of the keywords from your Adwords campaign, and this is where the added value lies.

You see, every time such a user clicks on your ad, the keyword term will be specified in the request which goes to your website. In other words, in your logs it looks like the person searched for some keyword term and found your page as one of the results.

How can you benefit from this?

The beauty of this approach is this: you get suggestions for hundreds of very relevant keywords, some of them vastly different from the original idea you had behind your Adwords campaign. The reason these keywords are relevant is because people opted clicking on your ad, so it’s not a relevancy calculated by Google, but the human intelligence.
Simply start expanding your website by adding pages targeting the newly discovered keyword combinations, and over time this will bring you an increase in natural search engines traffic.

For me, the most useful search would be finding the good articles among the ones you have starred in the past. If there was one feature I could add to Google Reader, this would be the one. So I’m really glad it’s finally arrived.

For the official announcement, go read the post on Google Reader blog, otherwise have a quick look at the screenshot, and go on – give it a try yourself!

Update 15/03/2008: – I’ve just noticed how someone liked this post enough to stumble it, so I have made a quick update to the post with some more steps of my new blog routine. Also, please check out the WordPress Plugins Magic website for a ready-made collection of plugins for download.

Here is what I do, feel free to ask questions in comments:

WordPress Setup

• Enable Akismet plugin, you’ll need a WordPress API for this
• Make all the files under wp-content/themes writable for your webserver – this will allow you to edit themes from WordPress control panel
• Create a .htaccess file in the top level directory of your WordPress install, and make it writable for your webserver to allow permalinks config from WordPress control panel

Basic SEO

• Enable permalinks, chose the permalink structure wisely – if you’re aiming for a timeless content, don’t use date tags.
• Download and activate the SEO Title Tag plugin. Change the options to use category names and blog name in relevant titles if you like.
• Download and activate the Google Sitemap Generator plugin. Submit your newly generated sitemap through the Google Webmaster Tools page.

Improve experience for your visitors

• Download and activate the Smart Archives plugin , you will probably need to create a separate page for it and put the appropriate tag for it to show the archives.
• Register a FeedBurner feed, install and point to it the FeedSmith plugin. Enable the SmartFeed option in FeedBurner‘s Optimize section for your new feed.

Open ways for interaction

• Set up a comment form (cForms for me – the best forms plugin ever!) – again, you’ll probably want to create a separate page for this.
• Download and activate the Sociable plugin (check out my tutorial on configuring it: Must Have Plugins: Sociable)

Hope this helps. My list is never static, I practically reinvent it every time I start a new project, so I’ll be updating this post from time to time.

For all of us FeedBurner users, exciting times are coming: looks like Google indeed buys FeedBurner for $100m!

I think the following things are going to happen rather soon:

• feed stats will be improved and extended
• Google Analytics users will probably see FeedBurner stats integrated
• more monetization options will arrive: Adsense for Feeds will get a rework and will become part of standard FeedBurner services
• more feed optimization options will become available

I've been using the 103bees.com service for a couple of weeks now, and it's definitely a must-have search engine traffic analysis tool for any serious blogger.

From the 103bees official website:

What is 103beees.com?

It's a real-time online tool for webmasters and bloggers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. It provides tons of detailed statistics and in-depth information on the search terms that drive visitors to your webpages.

103bees is an indispensable tool for search engine optimization and internet marketing – everything you need to know about your search engine traffic in one place!

This tool allows you to easily get various views of your search engine traffic in real time. At any time, you can view a list of the latest searches which brought visitors to your pages, as well as see your top landing pages, top keywords used or SERP rankings of the all search requests which generated traffic. All this is provided for free, and you get a 30 days of historical data to analyze for as many websites (you call them projects in your 103bees account) as you like.

I'll write a review for it in the coming few days, but for the moment just wanted to share this tool with you and point you to a great review by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger: 103bees: Search Term Analytics Review.

But SEOmoz have just posted a great article on Expectations and Best Practices for Moving to or Launching a New Domain. What I really liked about this article is not only the realistic expectations set for both scenarios, but also truly the best practices for achieving your goals.

Here are just some of the really good advices given in the article:

1. Submit and verify your sitemap to Googe's Webmaster Central.
2. Get as many links to your new domain as possible
3. Update all your own links to reflect the new domain and not the old, redirected one.
4. Monitor your logs and contact major resources linking to you to update their links

An excellent article, Rand! Thanks a lot for sharing!