TechPuddle is a site I purchased last year from an online friend of mine. I have several blogs that I run with paid writers – I don’t have too much time for blogging these days. TechPuddle doesn’t make me a fortune, but it pays the bloggers and buys me a few beers each month

When designing a site there is no need to reinvent the wheel – sometimes it is easier to follow the leader. If you are a reader of tech blogs you will see that TechPuddle is basically emulating what Engadget.com and other popular tech blogs do – and obviously these bigger guys have done a lot of work on ad placement and site design to optimize their income.

The theme I created for TechPuddle is similar to Engadget in that it has variable width (it stretches in width to fit large screen resolutions and shrinks in width on small screen resolutions so that it still shows all the ads in the right hand sidebars- many themes with right hand sidebars lose revenue on low resolution screens as the ads are ‘cut off’ the screen!) Other features that are similar to Engadget are the double sidebar with industry-standard widths (the sidebars are optimized to fit standard size adunits and banners) and inline advertisements after every post or two. In addition, there is a header advertisement (although this doesn’t get much traffic – I’ve been thinking of incorporating a site-relevant headline above it to draw the readers eye).

One tip I picked up from Zac (the previous owner of TechPuddle) was to include a break in most blog posts – this means that the reader has to view two pages to read the entire story and then reload the previous page to continue reading down the news stories. More pageviews = more revenue from advertisements (even if the number of clicks are the same many advertisers such as valueclick pay per pageview). More importantly, contextual advertising such as AdSense becomes more tightly targeted when on a single post page as the content and tags are all related to one topic, rather than the topics of all posts on the index page.

As with most of the things I do, this theme is a work in progress. I’m going to release it as soon as I make it a little more user friendly. Before I do release it I would love some feedback – any views on ad placement, features etc. Save me doing it twice

Please also leave a comment below to be notified as soon as the theme is released. (BTW, I’m going to turn on my dofollow as soon as I get through the comment backlog). Chow fer now…

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AdSense theme is widget ready and has been designed for WP 2.1 (Ella). I’m hoping that the grey background and grey text should lead the readers eyes to the adsense adverts for a good conversion rate. Again, this theme has been designed without the use of images so it is quick and easy to implement on any Wordpress blog.

If you do download and use the theme please let me know what you think by commenting on the theme over at Themey.com

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This theme might look pretty basic… that’s because it is!

This theme has been designed to be quickly added to any Wordpress site with no customisation. There is no need to alter header images because there aren’t any… like Kubrick it relies on text generated from your blogs title and description, and also from the category and post descriptions.

Adsense is integrated (3 units per page, and one linkunit ~ the maximum Google allows), and the theme also includes Adsense for search in place of the standard Wordpress search function. Of course, it is easy to switch out Adsense for any other advertising program you may wish to use, the banners are standard sizes.

Some basic SEO has been carried out… the “title” and “h1″ tags contain the most relevant information… on a post page, the post title is used, on a category the category title is used etc. This should give Search Engines a better understanding of your page, and hence an improved ranking for your page. Another often overlooked advantage of correct use of tags is that your result in the SERPs will be formed correctly, so instead of your websites name (eg. pilkster.com) being used in every result, the page title (eg. SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme) or category title will be used. This is a much more useful and appealing result for the searcher.

This theme is also compatible with my Amazon Plugin For Wordpress.

Adsense is located in the following files; header.php (728×15 linkunit), footer.php (728×90 adunit), sidebar.php (336×280 adunit, 160×600 adunit).

Adsense for search is located in searchform.php.

The theme is intentionally basic and should be simple to build up and out from. If you use this theme as-is, or build a new theme from it, please let me know by commenting on this post.

Download SEO Adsense Wordpress Theme

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Once I have cleaned up the stylesheet I’m going to use this theme as the basis for a bunch of themes, so please let me know if something looks out of place

This is a blockquote

1. Ordered list
2. Wordpress
3. Adsense

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See the theme in action at this new self tanning site.

The theme currently doesn’t work with my amazon plugin for wordpress, I hope to address that soon.

I hope that the theme is useful to someone out there – please dont forget to link to me (and Hardi P.) to show your appreciation!

adsense-boqpod.zip

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When using this theme make sure that you have set maximum posts shown to three in dashboard > options > reading. This is a requirement as the theme will show an adunit in each post summary, and three is the magic (maximum) number allowable by Google. There is an adlink unit in the header too, this is additional to the three adunits.
Adsense has been added to

• header.php (a 728×15 linkunit)
• index.php (a 468×60 adunit which will show in each post summary)
• archive.php (same as index.php)
• page.php (a 336×280 adunit)
• single.php (a 160×600 adunit and a 336×280 adunit)

You will need to add your adsense id to these files.

Depending on the content of your site, and the purpose of the advertising, you may wish to remove some of the adsense units, or maybe even add some more (single.php only has two, and page.php only one).

Download theme

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