While the inner workings of the AdSense program are a closely guarded trade secret, with Google neither disclosing how much AdWords advertisers pay per click nor how much sites displaying AdSense banners are paid for their placements.

There are no official figures, but there is a lot of talk online about how much website owners can use by using the AdSense program. There are of course those who illegally disclose their AdSense earnings; some claim that more than a thousand dollars per month can be made solely through the use of AdSense.

There are also rumors out there of website owners making more than $100,000 per month in AdSense revenue. While these stories stretch the limits of credibility, the truth is that you can very likely at least make your website pay for itself.

For those who host a large number of pages, AdSense can be a great thing. Even if these pages don’t make a lot of money on their own, all of those clicks add up and a significant amount of money can be made this way.

While it’s impossible to know exactly how much you’ll make by using AdSense, you can estimate by thinking about a few important factors.

The first thing to consider is the amount of traffic your site receives on a daily basis. You can’t predict this number exactly but you can estimate based on your average number of hits per day. If you can safely predict a healthy amount of traffic coming in to your site, then there is a good chance of making an appreciable amount of money using the AdSense program.

The subject of your website matters a great deal – if your site is on a popular topic, then it is inevitable that you’ll get a large amount of banner ad clicks. This number can be expressed in terms of CTR, or click through ratio. What all of this means is that if you have a large proportion of your visitors clicking on your ad banners, then you’ll be earning a larger income through AdSense. The best way to ensure a high CTR is to have content which will attract visitors, since your AdSense banners will typically be centered on the same subject as your website.

The number of banners on your site and their positioning is also important. Having more links means more income; but don’t overdo it – no one wants to visit a distracting website laden with ad banners.

Positioning ads on your web pages is both an art and a science. There are parts of the page which the reader’s eye is naturally drawn to and others which they tend to ignore. Knowing what these places are can help website owners to greatly increase their AdSense earnings.

Your AdSense income depends on a number of factors. However, if you have a website with many pages or content which will bring in visitors and have a large amount of traffic, then you can pretty safely assume that you’ll have a decent amount of AdSense income.

Even If you dont think AdSense falls into those catergories, it is still well worth the minimal investment of time and effort it will take to set it up. At the very least it can help to defray the costs of maintaining your website and make you a little extra income every month.

But who do you do this? Well, the major way you’ll get visitors to see your website (other then using AdWords, which is encouraged as well) is to use some techniques to have search engines send more and more users towards your page, by ranking high in search results for your topics of interest.

Believe it or not this is a technique, better known as search-engine optimization or simply SEO. So here are a bunch of tips that come handy under every amateur or professional optimizer’s belt.

The first thing you need to take care of is the actual source code and layout of your page. This has to be kept as simple as possible. The problem comes when AdSense and the search engines themselves begin to have troubles in extracting the most relevant keywords on your site because of a too complex layout.

Secondly, try to have each one of your pages target only one specific topic. This way it is a lot easier for them to get indexed properly and for the AdSense ads to be consistent with the content of the site itself.

Also, try not to include too many hyperlinks in your page as well. This also means you should try not to use too many AdSense ads on your page either.

If there are certain keywords you wish to target, make sure the word you wish to target is present in the title, in the first paragraphs as well as in the name of the file. While you’re at it you might want to ensure the word springs up in the page’s last paragraphs.

And of course, it’s very important for your content to have original and compelling content. How do you do this? Well the easiest way to do it is to find something you’re really passionate about. That way, providing you give it a lot of effort you’re bound to have a great page quite fast.

If the content you use in your site is in the public domain (which is highly discouraged) make sure that you at least give it an original title, and add an opening and a closing paragraph of your own.

This takes a little while, but if, after waiting, you still can’t find your page near the top, you should try rewriting your title and your first and last paragraphs. It doesn’t take much, often just changing a few words will give you the right results.

And of, course there’s the use of keyword tools that may aid you in finding some good keywords to include on your page that will drive visitors to your site more and more.

So those are about the basic techniques in search engine optimization. You can find a lot of computer tools to aid you in doing this, and of course, Google is a great place to search for this.

In the end, you’ll find that SEO is a complex topic, and entire books have been written on the topic as well. You might find that you have a lot of optimization you need to do in order to get more and more visitors to your site and clicking those precious AdSense banners.

You need to have optimized niche website templates for best results.

There are many ways to turn traffic into AdSense traffic and here is a short list of them with a description for each.

The first thing that you need to do is tune up your site’s contents. While for some people this isn’t an option (if you’re running a forum for example it’s a lot harder) most people can make their AdSense sites veritable cash cows.

To begin, you should find out what your site’s keywords are. This is a basic technique in SEO (search engine optimization) known as keyword density verification. A good tool for this job is SEO Density Analizer.

You should then take this list of words and search the Overture Search Inventory or Google AdWords Sandbox to find out what other words could be doing better then what you currently have.

From that point on try to keep your site focused on the things that appear mostly in the keyword suggestions you receive. Try to include those keywords, or at least some related keywords as often as you can in the links on your site.

Because of the way Google AdSense works this is a sure way to increase your earnings because you’ll get better ads in your AdSense banners, similar to how you would get a better Google PageRank

It’s also important that you continuously add new pages to your site. This is very important, as the more pages you have, the higher the chance is that you’ll get more hits on your ads.

It’s also very important that you choose the appropriate formats for your AdSense banners and the best locations for them. While this is a much wider subject you should generally know that the top three Google AdSense formats are: 336×280 large rectangle 300×250 medium rectangle and 160×600 skyscraper.

Make sure you choose the appropriate colors for the ads, as making them too different from your site’s content (or just different in a bad way) is sure to make visitors regard them as banners which have nothing to do with the site itself.

Make sure these ads are positioned where they’ll generate the highest amount of profit. Most times, that location is said to be right before the beginning of your site’s actual content.

On pages with a long text body, you might find skyscrapers to do better, simply because users get exposed to them for more time. Also, for sites with news or similar items, you might find a good position to be at the bottom of your content, because that’s when people are finished reading your story and are looking for something else to do.

You should use more AdSense units if you have a lot of text on your page. Just make sure not to overdo it because you might find that you will get a lot lower CTR and lower revenues then you were getting in the first place by employing this technique inappropriately. You can add as many as three units, so use them wisely.

There’s a Google AdSense Preview Tool that will let you visualize what ads would get served on your page and it can come in very handy as a testing mechanism.

Just make sure you respect the AdSense policy regarding click fraud. As a pointer you could place a picture next to your adds, just make sure to leave some room in between in order to make sure this isn’t regarded as encouraging visitors to click the link.

Of course there are more ways to increase AdSense traffic from your site, but these should serve as a good starting point for income maximization.

Firstly, it’s clear that targeting algorithms will become even better and more powerful then they are now. This has clearly been seen with the Google search engine itself over the last few years and it should be of no surprise as this happens with AdSense. Advertisers will appear in more appropriate results and those advertisers who manipulate their content to allow high paying keywords to appear may struggle to do this unless it is actually appropriate to their content.

Another thing which is bound to happen is more protection for AdWords advertisers concerning click fraud. Google acknowledges this to be a very key issue that it needs to address as quickly as possible and there’s no doubt it will happen as fast as possible. At the moment those who have high levels of traffic, can easily disguise IP addresses and increase CTR ( Click Through Rate).

Google is always keen on improving its products and this has been seen before in AdSense. The search engine company has introduced site-targeted AdSense CPM, “smart pricing” and domain blocking and there will probably be improvements that have already been added by other similar sites.

One such example is the option for the advertiser to have more control over where the content is being displayed. This could mean blocking your site from displaying on several addresses that host AdSense banners.

Another idea that has been advanced is that Google will integrate AdSense in other forms of media like newspapers or television and so on. While this might seem to be more on the science-fiction side of the facts there’s no indication that this might not happen.

Google have access to an international array of over 150,000 advertisers of whom may choose to penetrate offline markets in different countries. With Google’s strong network of advertisers, they may choose to appoint or allow offline distributors to create a format for Adwords advertising in content, in search and now offline.

More options could be implemented for AdSense publishers, allowing them to specify keywords of their own. While Google has been reluctant of this there’s no indication that this will not happen in the future.

Also, a lot of people are demanding a clear specification of the pricing policy of AdSense. Google has given no indication of why this isn’t public information but at this moment it seems highly unlikely that such information will ever be present on Google AdSense.

Another feature that could find itself into AdSense would be letting website publishers see which links are generating clicks on their website and based on what keywords they arrive there.

This could end up being a major issue that could threaten the entire system as it could perhaps encourage more adsense only websites as profits become more transparent. A lot of people may make AdSense-only sites, designed just for making profits through AdSense.

While this is already happening today, it might be foolish of Google to put such tools in the hands of its publishers.

However, one thing that could happen is a way for users to fix their issues with low AdSense generated income on their site. This could be done through an on-line wizard or something similar that would make suggestions to website owners based on their contents.

But the major buzzword of the day is RSS. The possibility of sending targeted ads directly to users without requiring any navigation on their behalf is becoming a reality with RSS. And there are clear signs that Google isn’t going to let such an opportunity pass by.

This is what “interactive television” and similar items have been trying to do for quite some time now. But the Internet would be a much better medium for this, because there are no mediums quite as interactive as the Internet.

But in the end, this is mostly speculation and we are bound to have Google surprising us with new features we would have never thought of.