The big problem with Google’s Adsense is that quite often website owners think that more is better. More adsense means more chances of clicks. How very wrong this is!

If you read the Adsense guidelines you will read that you can put 3 content blocks, search blocks and more all onto one page. And you are encouraged to put on as many locks of different varieties as you can fit. But, this can be a massive disaster! It is not true that by putting more Adsense blocks around your blog that you will automatically be able to earn more income. In fact, the opposite can become true.

One great big advert
What happens is that if your blog contains too much advertising it will look like a huge advert. Blogs depend on readers for their lifeline and need plenty of them. And this means that readers need to be reading multiple pages, subscribing to newsletters and RSS feeds and coming back time and time again. And a visitor will only become a regular reader of you blog if they like it and trust it.

And that is the problem of a blog that is a huge advert – you instantly lose the trust of the people who are visiting it and they might never come back.

What is the answer?
In fact, with careful planning you can really make a huge blogging income from Adsense with just a single block of adverts. Place a single block of adverts well and you can really make the most of the adverts that Google displays for you, without having to look like a huge advertising board.

The rule of thumb
A good rule of thumb to work to is to have no more than two areas of advertising on your website, Each can contain a few adverts, maybe a mixture of Adsense and affiliate banners, but do not dedicate more than this to advertising. This will leave your visitors feeling comfortable with your website.

Make the most of the space you have
But this will only work best with a litle care and attention. I know from experience that when I moved my adverts from the right hand column to across the top my click through rate increased drastically. So you need to put your main adverts where people will see them. That varies depending on your layout, but will typically include:

• in or next to main navigation
• across the top and left of the screen
• sometimes, within the content of your posts

Make it work for you
What will work the best for you? Unfortunately, there is no clear and sharp rule as to what will work best. However, there is plenty of evidence that too much will scare off visitors and reduce your click through rate.

The only way to see what works for you is to give it a go. Change your blog about and try different combinations, whilst watching your click through rate and how many pages visitors are reading on average.

Don’t let too much Adsense ruin your blog!

I am sure that plenty of people, like me, want to move the wp-config folder to a more secure and private directory to keep it out of the way of prying eyes.

And here it is not just hackers – maybe it would be best that other users with FTP access and so on should not see the contents and be able to change them.

However, all that WordPress allows you to do is to shove the config file up one level, e.g. from mysite.com/blog to mysite.com. Yes, it hides it, but does it really help?

So I have developed a little script here that can sort out the problem. For example, in my hosting there is a public directory into which the files are stored and a private directory that can only be accessed by FTP or from a call within a script from a relative path.

Now normally I’d call it simple by ‘../private/myscript.php’, however with WordPress we don’t know whether we are in the blog or deep in some convoluted file structure, for example /2011/march/28/ etc. So we have to work out how many directories into the site we are to give a relative path to the private directory.

So here’s what I did. I moved wp-config.php to my private directory and replaced it with this code. Just check your permissions to make sure that only you can read / write the file and everyone else can only execute it. There is also a check towards the end that the wp-config is being called from only our site, just in case a hacker gets clever there…

<?php
$found = substr_count($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'],’/');
$i=0;
$myroot = ”;
while ($i {$myroot .= ‘../’; $i++;}
$togo = array (‘http:’, ‘/’, ‘www.’);
$thisserver = str_replace($togo, ”, strtolower($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']) ) ;
if ($thisserver == ‘howtostartmyblog.com’)
{require_once($myroot.”private/wp-config.php”);}
?>