ZillionBits-Its about number$ and te<h^0!0gy

I’ve long been a member of Amazon’s affiliate program, One of the new features available via the Amazon Associates program is the Amazon aStore, which Darren Rowse already reviewed, but here’s the quick summary: an aStore is an Amazon-hosted website that displays Amazon products chosen by the associate. It can be customized to a certain degree to let the visitor also see categories of products, but it really needs more customization capabilities. All product information comes from Amazon’s databases, of course, and any purchases made through an aStore earn the affiliate a commission. The idea is to make it easy to build a featured set of products and include it on an associate’s website with no programming required. (If you’re willing to invest some time and do some programming, however, you’re better off looking at Amazon Web Services, you’ll get much more control that way.

Anyhow, I was wondering if it was possible to integrate AdSense into an Amazon aStore, so I did some experimentation and came up with The HDTV Shoppe (opens a new window).

There’s actually very little direct integration you can do with an aStore. The store itself is hosted by Amazon. In fact, this link shows you an aStore without all the frills of The HDTV Shoppe. You either open your aStore in a new window, just like I just showed you, or else embed it in a site using conventional or inline frames. The aStore is effectively a “black box” that you place on a page of your website. Which means that the content of the aStore is really not part of your site. Which means that the AdSense crawler will only see it indirectly. And, more importantly, which means you can’t place AdSense ads in the aStore content.

So what you have to do is place your ads around the aStore. Look back at The HDTV Shoppe. The main part of the screen, the one labelled “Hot HDTV Sets” and “Search”, is my aStore, embedded into the home page using an iframe. So where is my AdSense?

Take a look at the left side of the window, at the navigation menu. Do you see it? Yes, I’ve used a vertical link unit, something I rarely ever use, but in this case it seemed appropriate. What I’ve done is styled my navigation menu so that the link unit blends right into it. I then made sure to add lots of topical, keyword-laden links to the menu, to have a proper page title, and to make sure “HDTV” was in the headings and in the domain name as well. Although you should do these things anyhow, they take on even more importance when there’s very little content on the page itself — remember, most of the content on the home page is actually nested inside an iframe and is not considered to be part of the page by AdSense.

The other pages on the site, the ones that don’t involve the aStore, are conventional pages, of course, so I was able to add a normal ad unit to them along with a bit of content. I should probably thrown an AdSense search box on those pages as well.

I wouldn’t say this site’s my best work, but mostly I just wanted to show you one way of integrating AdSense with embedded content. You could use similar tricks with Flash-based content, for example, or with embedded videos. Without resorting to keyword-stuffing or dubious blackhat techniques to get the right ads to show.

Originally from An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google on October 11, 2006, 2:07pm