Adding Google advertisements, or AdSense, to your website using Nvu is a simple procedure. This article shows you how you can do this in a few easy steps.

Preliminary Matters

• Creating a Website

  This article assumes that you already have an existing website. If this is not true, please read the Beginner's A-Z Guide on How to Start Your Own Website. That article takes you through all the steps necessary to get your website started, and points you to my Nvu tutorial so that you can design your website.

• Signing Up for a Google AdSense Account

  You should also have signed up for an AdSense account (which you can find listed among other advertising networks on thefreecountry.com's Affiliate Programs: Free Sponsors and Advertisers page). If not, go ahead and do it now. If you want to have an overview of the entire procedure, you can read my article How to Add Google Advertisements to Your Blog or Website.

Steps to Inserting Google Ads on Your Website

1. Log into your AdSense account and click "AdSense Setup". A new page will load. Click "AdSense for Content". You will be taken through a series of steps that lets you choose the type of advert you want for your site, as well as customize its size and colours. This is necessary because everyone's site looks different, and you will want to change the ad to suit your site's design.

   When you are through customising your advertisement to your satisfaction, click "Submit and Get Code". You will be given a snippet of code to insert into your web page. Click somewhere inside the box with this code. The code will automatically be selected. Then click your right mouse button and select "Copy".

2. Start up Nvu and load the page where you want to insert the ad. Advertisements can be inserted anywhere on your web page. Their placement on the page depends totally on you. For example, you can insert a vertical advertisement on your side panel or even embed advertisements within your main page content.

   However, much as you may want to put ads on your site to recover the costs of running your website, you should balance that against the side-effect of making your site unfriendly to users as a result of obnoxious placements of ads. For example, many well-known newspaper sites like to stick their ads smack in the middle of an article. Such a placement have a high annoyance factor to readers since they interrupt the flow of reading.

   To be fair to those sites, though, I should add that such irritating in-your-face ad placements also earn a lot more than the unobtrusive ad-placements I use on thesitewizard.com, since those ads are actually noticed by their visitors, unlike mine. Obviously, if no one even sees your ads, no one is going to click them!

3. After your page is loaded in Nvu, click the spot where you want the advertisement to appear. Then click the "Insert" menu followed by the "HTML..." item on the menu that appears.

4. A dialog box will appear. Paste the code you copied earlier into the empty space provided. To do this, click the right mouse button in the box and select "Paste" from the menu that pops out. Your Google advertisement code will appear in the box. Click the "Insert" button.

5. You won't be able to see your advertisement in Nvu. Don't worry. If you have completed all the previous steps, the code is there. It's just not visible in the web editor. Publish your web page to your site in your usual way.

6. Now surf to that page using your web browser. Note that this must be your published copy on your website, not the local copy on your own hard disk. Make sure that JavaScript is enabled in your web browser, or you won't be able to see your advertisement. If you don't know what JavaScript is, or you don't know how to "make sure" that it is enabled, it means that it's already enabled.

   Don't worry if the advertisement does not show up at first. When the page is first loaded, Google needs to send its AdSense bot (computer program) to grab a copy of your page and "read" its content. After it has retrieved your page, it will select adverts that are relevant to your page. As a result, it is possible that you may not see your advertisement the first time you load your page. Just wait a while and reload the page again. You should then be able to see your new ad. (Remember not to click on your own ad! If you don't know why, read my other article on AdSense.)

Congratulations

Congratulations. You have successfully added Google AdSense advertisements to your site using Nvu.