leveraging Opera text ads

[sonofslim]

so i'm designing a site for an artist named sydney, located in brooklyn. i open it up in Opera to check it -- i'm using opera's free ad-supported version. i notice that the google-sponsored ads at the top of my window fall into two categories: tour packages to sydney, australia, and brooklyn businesses.

which gets me thinking: is this an untapped method of seeing how useful your meta tags are? i can't help that google thinks my client is a major city, but i'm digging the fact that it's picking up my meta description: "Brooklyn-based painter and illustrator." i'd dig it more, though, if it fed me ads relating to painting or illustrating... and so i'm going to spend some time tweaking my keywords and descriptions.

does anyone else see this as a pretty exciting way to get instant feedback on the effectiveness of your meta tags, or is my enthusiasm related mainly to those beers i just knocked back?

 

[davecuse]

I guess there's the possibility that you could alter the meta tags to have the ads in Opera be more on point. I don't really see the benefit of putting any work into it though. Opera gets paid if people click on relevant ads, not your client or you. Sure you would be helping them out, if you're a big supporter of Opera that's cool, but I don't think I would spend too much of my time trying to make them a few cents. Not only that but you'd also have to consider that the more closely those ads match what you are looking for, it opens the possibility of people clicking on them and moving away from your site.

 

[sonofslim]

i'm talking about using Opera's Google-generated ads as a measure of how effective my meta tags are at conveying the right information to Google. i'm not tweaking the meta tags specifically to get better Opera ads; i'm tweaking them to get better search results, and using the ads as a way to get immediate feedback on how Google is "reading" my page.

i see it this way: the ads in Opera are generated by Google. i figure the algorithm that decides what ads to place in Opera must be related, to some extent, to the algorithms that determine Google's page relevance. so if i can get those Google-generated ads to reflect what i want, then i know i'm feeding the right information to Google. which means my page has a better chance of showing up in the right searches.

take the page i was talking about earlier. if all of the ads in Opera are for tours to Sydney, Australia, then i've failed to make Google realize this is a page about painting and illustration. which suggests that when someone does a search for painting and/or illustration, this page is not going to get ranked very high. but if i keep changing those metas until Google starts returning ads for, let's say, painting and illustration supplies, or even other artists, then i know i've done a better job of getting Google to recognize what this page is about. so, in theory, the page should now have a higher search rank than the page with those metas that implied sydney, australia.

what really got me excited is that it's an instantaneous process. i change some tags, preview it in Opera, and right away i know what Google thinks of my page. compare that to changing the tags in a live site, waiting a few weeks for Google to re-crawl it and update its database, and then doing a bunch of searches to see where it ranks. the Opera-ad may not be an exact stand-in for your Google rankings, but i think it offers some insight, that you wouldn't otherwise have, into the effectiveness of your content.

see where i'm going with that? in a nutshell: more relevant ads = more relevant rankings.

 

[davecuse]

Ah, I see what you are talking about now. That does sound like a very good way to test your Meta tags for relevance. Had not occured to me before.