Over the past few days, I have come across a few Adsense tips that are worth sharing:

• Using Images to Increase Adsense CTR - A user on digitalpoint forums quadrupled his Adsense CTR when he placed related images next to his Adsense ads. The thread gives an interesting view of the before and after layouts. In order for this to be in compliance with the Adsense terms of service, you have to have a border around the images or a line separating the images and the ads. I will not do try this on MonetizeTraffic, but I could see using it on some of my other sites.
• Adsense Tips Forum Thread - Another digitalpoint thread where members share some adsense tips. I really like this YPN optimized layout mentioned in the thread.
• Adsense Order Matters - A blog post from the Adsense team at Google where they explain that the first ad in the HTML code of your site receives the highest paying advertisements. Therefore, you should try to put the ad space with the highest click through rate first in the HTML of your site.
• Using the Competitive Ad Filter to Eliminate MFA Sites - A good post about how you can enter the URL of known Made For Adsense (MFA) sites into the Competitive Ad filter in Adsense to prevent the ads from being shown on your site. These ads are usually low paying ones where the landing page features a slew of other Adsense ads. Eliminating these from the ads served on your site should help to boost your earnings.

I am always on the look out for good Adsense tips and tricks. If you have some good ones, feel free to contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Update: The Adsense team recently put up a blog post clarifying their position on images next to ads. According to their post, it looks like they are strongly against placing images next to ads. They provide a number of examples of what is against policy, and they are even against images with a border between the image and the Adsense ads. This will pretty much kill the usefulness of some of the Adsense plugings that I wrote about in my Adsense Tips: Part II post .

Webmaster and bloggers will continue to innovate and push the limit around Adsense placement. Just be careful with images because Google has now clearly come out with their stance.