We’ve found that reaching this magic number is a key indicator of when you should put ads on your site, and as a result, it’s become a goal for many bloggers just starting out.

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The post Mediavine Publishers Grow Exponentially AFTER Joining. Here’s Why. appeared first on Mediavine.

Let’s break down the Mediavine requirements and application process:

Mediavine Application Requirements

Mediavine requires 50,000 sessions a month (usually around 60,000 pageviews), according to Google Analytics. Unlike other ad management services, we use sessions as our metric of choice. (And here’s why.)

In short, we’ve found sessions to be the ideal metric for gauging how an audience interacts with a particular website, as well as its monetization potential. For further reading on the topic, see our recent guide explaining what is RPM and how Mediavine calculates it.

Mediavine requirements include much more than just session totals, however. So what else are we looking at during the application process?

Website Quality

Those familiar with Mediavine know that integrity and reputation mean everything to us. This is not only our mentality with publishers, but within the industry and with advertisers as well.

There’s a reason Mediavine delivers industry leading CPMs.

Incredible sales and revenue teams working behind the scenes, engineers developing innovative technology, and a support staff working 24/7 to help publishers all set us apart, but we’d be going nowhere fast if advertisers didn’t trust the quality of Mediavine sites.

Mediavine has built the largest, most trusted, brand-safe portfolio of sites at this scale, and we’ve developed longstanding partnerships with advertisers that typically wouldn’t work with what the industry (meaning advertisers, not publishers) often calls a “network.”

Remember, Mediavine is more than a network, and the reason advertisers trust and work with us is our reputation.

We maintain that uniquely high industry standard with the strictest guidelines and requirements of any ad management company out there.

Size and Quality Are Not One and the Same

We often hear that other companies require more traffic than Mediavine. This is true, but more traffic does not mean stricter quality guidelines.

Mediavine takes a long-game, holistic approach to ad management. Our bloggers produce quality content and provide advertisers with excellent value because their audiences are engaged. That happens at 50,000 sessions or 25 million sessions.

That’s what’s important to us, and it’s why we have such strict guidelines for whom is accepted.

Think about it this way: When searching for anything — a recipe, a credit card or the news of the day — do you rely on only the biggest and loudest voices, or do you turn to smaller, more personal and authentic sources you know you can trust?

So What Defines Quality?

At Mediavine, we require publishers to create original content that engages with users, to be closely vetted and to be in good standing within the industry and with our ad partners. We examine the following factors with every site that applies to Mediavine:

Original, Engaging Content

From craft, parenting and travel blogs to food, finance and fitness, Mediavine publishers succeed in all verticals and all are welcomed. First and foremost, our support team looks at the top-performing and most recent posts on every site to ensure that users are engaged with its content.

The reason is simple: If users aren’t engaged with content, they’re not going to be engaged with ads. Advertisers are obviously seeking a return on their investment, and if ads with Mediavine aren’t performing, they won’t see that return and will realize it quickly.

Clean, Verified, White-Listed Traffic

Going hand-in-hand with content that engages readers? Actual, human readers. Wild concept, right? Every Mediavine applicant submits a PDF providing us with their Google Analytics and all the traffic and user behavior insights therein. This allows us to ensure that traffic is natural and organic.

You’d be surprised (or maybe you wouldn’t) at the sheer amount of NHT (non-human traffic) or paid traffic plaguing the Internet. Some studies have suggested that up to 40 percent of all online ads are served to fraudulent visitors. At Mediavine, that percentage is close to zero.

After extensive vetting using Google Analytics, we hand things off to our ad partners who use internal blacklists and third-party tools, such Integral Ad Science and White Ops, to further verify your traffic and safeguard our reputation, their own and yours as well. Everybody wins.

Google Adsense Good Standing

Mediavine is a Google Certified Publisher Partner and one of the biggest players in the industry is Google AdExchange. In order to make sure sites perform optimally, we’ll make sure your site is in current good standing with Google AdSense and Google AdExchange.

We unfortunately can no longer work with sites that are not.

Eliminating Ad Policy Violations Before They Happen

We recently joined the Coalition For Better Ads, but Mediavine was a vocal advocate for the highest industry standards long before that, placing user experience above all else.

As part of our requirements, we ensure publishers won’t be hit with policy violations pertaining to ad density, incorrect sticky or refresh ads or other non-disruptive units.

A frequent question we get is how many ads does Mediavine run? Short answer: the perfect amount to maximize viewability and page speed, resulting in the best CPMs and user experience.

Brand Safety

Advertisers are understandably vigilant about their brands running alongside appropriate content, not material that could tarnish their image. We vet all sites to make sure their content is brand safe.

Once you make it through the application process, all of which is vetted by Mediavine, the rest is remarkably fast, thanks to our ad technology and incredible launch team.

We know the Mediavine requirements and application process might seem a bit more involved and strict than some publishers expect, but the results are well worth it.

The post Mediavine Requirements: Why Our Application Process Yields the Best Results appeared first on Mediavine.

Increase your font size.

We say it’s quick because it should require one easy change to your theme’s settings page, or a few adjustments to your stylesheet, to make this site-wide improvement.

Much of the advice we normally give publishers is on a per-post or a per-page basis which could require a lot of work on a lot of content over time.

This site-wide tweak is quick and easy — relatively speaking. We can’t just tell you what settings to change as font size is a little more technical than one-size-fits-all.

The internet is very different than the world of print or word processors in every respect, and fonts are no different. It’s important to define font size in web-specific terms.

Font size, on the internet and everywhere else, still involves measuring the height of letters in your text, but it can be measured in multiple units on the web.

The five most common units of measurement you’ll see are:

1. point (pt)
2. pixels (px)
3. em
4. rem
5. percentages

You’re likely familiar with the first two on this list, especially points. If your theme uses these, providing you with a size recommendation is a lot easier.

But first, a caveat: Points do NOT equal pixels.

Points-to-pixels conversions will vary based upon the DPI (dots per inch) or the resolution of the device(s) your audience is using to read your content.

A general rule of thumb is that 12 pt will equal 16 px on most devices, but not all.

Now, on to the items you’re probably not familiar with on the above list: rem, em, and percentages. These three are all going to be “relative” font sizes.

While these are more advanced, they’re generally considered the preferred method in responsive web design, so there’s a chance your theme or design uses them.

These are all relative to the base font, usually 12pt or 16px on most devices; if you set a 1em, 1rem or 100%, then, in theory, that’s the same as picking 12pt or 16px for most devices.

This allows you easily define headers, lists and other elements relative to the body of your text. For example, you could set your headers to be 150% or 1.5em, making them 50% bigger.

If you simply want to increase the size of your entire website, you can adjust the font size on the body or root, and it will adjust everything else up.

You can use the following conversion chart as a rough estimate, but remember that devices, user settings, fonts, themes and parts of your stylesheet can impact all of these.

All of that said, what font sizes are best for boosting SEO and RPM?

Increasing Font Size for SEO (and Readers, Too)

Google uses a mobile-first index, meaning that when indexing your site to determine search engine rankings, they’re using the mobile version of your content.

The reason for this is simple: 80% of your readers are likely using mobile devices, so you should be prioritizing this as well. SEO, in this case, is entirely driven by user experience.

When designing your site and considering a font size, think of your most common reader. This is someone on a mobile phone, and they likely don’t have 20/20 vision.

If your font size is too small (and on mobile devices, it probably is), the first thing you’re doing is requiring your users do is pinch and zoom to read the content.

Having to do that throughout a site — especially one you read regularly or want to browse multiple pages of — makes for a terrible user experience.

That’s why Google’s Lighthouse tool measures font size, one major component of determining the mobile friendliness of your site, when calculating your SEO score.

The Lighthouse tool recently changed its own recommendations slightly, but it established 16 px as a base font of a site. That means the main text of your font should be set to 16px minimum.

In fact, that’s where Google’s Material Design style guide sets the base font size in its typography as well. So for SEO, you need a minimum of a 16px font to make sure your site is considered mobile friendly, which is crucial in the mobile-first index.

Increasing Font Size and Its Impact on RPM

Okay, so Google is happy with a 16px. Are we done?

Not quite.

Like most of our recommendations for SEO and user experience, adjusting font size can help your monetization. Our ad placement rules follow the Coalition for Better Ads standards, and like SEO guidelines, follows where user experience takes us.

We’re not going to insert ads unless your content justifies it. Larger font sizes don’t automatically mean larger content.

Plus, ads pay based on viewability and engagement. If you have a larger font size, and more users engaging with your content as a result, they’re also going to be more engaged with ads.

So what’s the ideal font size for monetization purposes?

Again, your main body size should be at a minimum 16px. If you’re using points, ems, percentages or any other units, make sure your body size is the equivalent (see conversion chart above).

We’d actually recommend going a little bit bigger than the minimum 16 px, just to be on the safe side, given differing devices: 18px should do the trick.

That may sound like a big number, but remember where your audience is reading and that it’s not an 18pt font; 18px is actually still pretty small on a mobile device.

Can you go even bigger than that?

Absolutely.

We’ve seen lots of sites perform extremely well with larger font sizes. Aimee of Shugary Sweets and Courtney of Sweet Cs discussed this during the Facebook Live they did with us a few years ago.

What’s important is that a bigger font size looks good and provides the best user experience for your readers. All themes and fonts will look different at different sizes.

It never hurts to experiment with your font sizes and see which looks best — as long as you remember that 16px needs to be the absolute minimum.

Where do you make these changes?

If your theme has customization options, that’s your go-to, as it will mesh with your theme most seamlessly. Always check there in the appropriate settings page of your theme.

If it doesn’t, email your theme creator as they’re likely the best source of information and advice on how to increase your font size within that particular theme.

If you need to do it yourself, then you’ll need to edit your CSS. Under there, you can adjust font sizes with a little CSS that would adjust your H1 (header tags) and body font size like this:

body {
font-size : 18px;
}

h1 {
font-size : 24px;
}

However, please note again that there’s so much going into a theme.

There are line heights, character kerning and fonts all set throughout the stylesheet. Often times, it’s best to bring in your theme’s support or a tech person to help.

That’s a lot of words for something that we promise is usually pretty simple. So good luck, and go make your readers, Google and your wallet a lot happier!

August 2019 Update: This continues to be one of the most popular posts on the Mediavine blog, and for good reason. Tons of our publishers have seen an RPM increase after implementing this quick tweak to their font size. We added a couple new links to this post for your reference!

August 2021 Update: Our WordPress theme, Trellis, is now available for all WordPress users! Trellis makes font management super easy: Change your site’s font size with just one setting right in the admin — no CSS knowledge needed!

Don’t miss our entire Increasing RPM series for even more ways to work on your RPM, or our Content Upgrade Challenge that helps you audit your posts.

The post Increase Font Size, and Increase SEO & RPM Along With It appeared first on Mediavine.

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The post Mediavine Display Adhesion: Introducing a New and Improved Ad Experience appeared first on Mediavine.

By definition, advertising runs counter to the goals of optimizing for SEO, a process which relies on a focus on your content and user experience.

However, as an ad management company that started as an SEO marketing firm, we have found the perfect balance, ensuring that the two can work together.

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The post SEO and Ads: Fact vs. Fiction and How Mediavine Optimizes Both Together appeared first on Mediavine.

Thanks to the in-content ad logic, Mediavine publishers have the ability to change ad density, the spacing between ads, and limits to the overall number of ads.

Since no two websites are exactly alike, we like to give publishers as much control as possible, but we also understand that with more options come more questions.

It’s tough to know the perfect settings for your site, which is why we’re breaking down what these settings do and offering some recommendations for different types of bloggers below.

Ad Density & Frequency Explained

Our in-content logic follows standards set by the Coalition for Better Ads in determining how often to insert advertisements into publishers’ content.

In the fraction of a second when your page loads, we measure the “height” of your content to ensure that the included ads do not exceed that recommended density.

It may sound complicated, but the density is a simple calculation: The sum of the height of all of the ads, combined, divided by the total height of your content.

Note: In-content ads, by definition, only apply to the main area of your content, so the density won’t take into consideration headers, footers, related posts, etc.

Bottom line: The higher the density you choose, the greater percentage of your content will contain ads. We allow up to the maximum CBA standards, or 30%.

How much Ad Density is just right?

For mobile, we recommend going high.

This is (most likely) where most readers view your content, and with a lot less real estate on mobile screens, in-content ads are critically important to maximizing your RPM.

Our default setting is 28% and we recommend keeping it there, below CBA limits, safe from any Chrome ad filtering and considered a solid user experience by both standards.

That being said, you can certainly raise the density to the full 30% if you’re comfortable with that, or conversely, dial it down below 28% if you feel it’s disrupting UX.

On desktop, we default to a lower setting.

Much lower, in fact: 20%. Desktop ads in general are worth more than their mobile counterparts, and additional ad units such as the sidebar contribute greatly to your RPM.

As such, in-content ads don’t have to shoulder as big a burden, and you can run fewer of them. We recommend leaving this setting alone and focusing on others, such as …

Ad Limits & Why You Should Optimize for Content Length

We give our publishers the ability to limit the total number of in-content ads that appear on a page. Our in-content logic will never exceed this amount.

Once you cap the amount, our logic will automatically space the ads out throughout your content, effectively giving you a lower density.

Our default settings for in-content ads is to optimize the number of ads based on the length of your content along with the density and spacing settings you’ve chosen in your dashboard. That means if your content can only support 4 ads, it only gets 4 ads. If it can support 14 ads, it’ll get 14 ads.

Not unlike when you scroll through your Facebook feed and never stop seeing ads every so often, we don’t want you to limit earnings from your content, either. This can make a big difference for publishers who are writing long-form content and want to ensure it is earning them the maximum returns that it can, without negatively impacting the user experience.

When should you adjust the Ad Limit?

We rarely suggest that someone should set a hard ad limit, but there are certain circumstances where it might make sense.

If you write a mix of short- and long-form content, and believe the long-form content is showing too many ads, we’ll typically recommend you use a limit rather than adjust density.

These default settings primarily exist for longer-form content, to ensure they are being properly monetized without arbitrary limits.

A high ad density is vital for monetizing short-form content, while a lower density shouldn’t hurt your earnings from longer-form content.

By setting a general ad limit for your content, rather than trying to obsess over the ad density, our ad logic takes care of this automatically for you.

Again, every site is different, but we always recommend using the limit settings rather than tweaking density if you offer a mixture of short- and long-form content, and would like to lower the amount of ads servings on the longer pieces.

As far as lowering ad limits, you can absolutely do so – it’s among the Dashboard settings for a reason -but you risk potentially harming your RPM, especially on mobile.

The long and short of it: If you nix the limits or set higher ones, you can do so with confidence in the research and density levels set by the CBA and applied by Mediavine.

Minimum Ad Spacing: How It Fits In

Now for the next piece of the puzzle. Our in-content logic inserts ads as often as it can to meet the ad density you select. This can mean multiple ads relatively close to each other.

Note: This is NOT a policy violation.

CBA logic is based on total “height” of content, NOT individual screen views, which is why we moved away from that metric in our calculations.

However, logic based on height alone doesn’t always lead to the best user experience, so we added a “minimum” buffer of text or images between ads.

Where should you set Minimum Ad Spacing?

Our default setting of 2 should work in most cases, but if you’ve taken our advice and write a lot of shorter sentences and paragraphs, you may want to bump that up to 3.

Especially on desktop, ads running too close together won’t perform great from a viewability or engagement standpoint, and again won’t be the best user experience.

By contrast, if you rely on longer, less-web friendly paragraphs, there won’t be many spots for in-content ads, so we’d suggest lowering that setting to 1 on desktop and mobile.

In-Content Placement Rules & How We Define Them

Last but not least, we offer an advanced setting that controls how the in-content logic places ads around images within your content.

You can choose to have the in-content ad logic only insert ads after text paragraphs, between text paragraphs, or anywhere.

For these purposes, a text paragraph is defined as a block of text containing words without images, video, iframe, or other non-text based content.

Why would you change Placement Rules?

Ever see an ad right after an image?

Not the best look, to state the obvious. Ads, much like images, are very visually driven. Having them appear back-to-back isn’t always aesthetically pleasing.

This setting also dates back to Mediavine’s previous (and now discontinued) in-screen based logic, when the conventional wisdom was that two ads could not appear in the same screen view.

Using this, we’re also able to ensure that if you were running GumGum In-Image ads, in-content ads wouldn’t appear directly after a GumGum In-Image Ad.

One question this may lead to: If ads appearing only after text paragraphs look better, and may lead to better ad engagement, why isn’t that the default?

The issue is that you need a lot of short, web-friendly text paragraphs and long-form content overall in order to change this setting without severely impacting your RPM.

If you do, you can consider testing the only after text paragraphs setting. In the short term, you’ll notice a negative impact to your RPM, but it may pay off in the long run.

After all, if ad engagement goes up, your CPMs are likely to do so as well, which could make up for fewer ad impressions you’re getting as a result.

And not insignificantly, we can nearly guarantee you’ll prefer the way your ads work.

TL;DR

We know.

The in-content settings which are set as defaults are all marked as default in the content section of the ad settings tab of your Dashboard.

Feel free to:

1. Set everything there if you’re nervous.
2. Email publishers@mediavine.com and have us take look at your site and offer advice on your settings. Our team is your team, 24/7/365.

The post In-Content Ad Settings: Choose Wisely For Improved RPM and UX appeared first on Mediavine.

Ten years ago, the original iPhone had just been released. In 2018, desktop traffic is hard to come by. Upwards of 80% of your readers likely do so on mobile devices.

In this mobile-first world, it’s time to rethink the sidebar once and for all.

Mediavine has been at war with the sidebar for years. When we entered the ad management space in 2014, most sidebars were millions of widgets long and loaded with ads.

We get it. Publishers and ad management companies alike were obsessed with desktop. More screen equals more ads, and websites would just keep adding widgets in a bid to balance the length of the sidebar with the length of their content.

However, it’s time to reassess the situation by asking yourself what your users actually need out of the sidebar in 2018, and how you can cut it down to size.

It’s a win-win exercise. As you might have guessed based on my recent posts, shortening your sidebar will improve your RPM and user experience alike.

Shorter Sidebar = Higher RPM

At Mediavine, we run just two sidebar ads: one at the top and the other at the bottom. The bottom sidebar ad, known as the Sidebar BTF (below the fold) or the Sticky Sidebar ad, is one of the best performing ads of all the units/placements we serve.

Why? It’s all in the name.

The sticky sidebar ad sticks with readers as they scroll, often leading to the highest viewability scores and most engagement of any Mediavine ad. Over the long run, the most viewable ad units with the best engagement become a publisher’s best earners.

See where this is going yet?

If you shorten your sidebar, the scrolling user will reach the sticky sidebar ad more quickly, and the faster they get there, the more time the sticky sidebar ad has to be viewed.

Even better from a monetization standpoint is the fact that the sticky sidebar ad refreshes, meaning more ad impressions and revenue the longer it appears on the user’s screen.

Greater impressions and revenue from your top performing display ad is a huge deal; this is actually what the Mediavine Dashboard sidebar health check is measuring.

Did the sticky sidebar ad stay on screen long enough to refresh once (Green) or twice (Teal)? A few seconds can make all the difference, and a shorter sidebar delivers just that.

User Experience and Shorter Sidebars

The correlation between your downsized sidebar and improved ad performance may be more obvious than its impact on user experience, but the latter can’t be overlooked.

What’s interesting is that while many publishers add widget after widget to their sidebar, few stop to analyze their audience’s interaction with these widgets.

Adding more and more widgets might seem like you’re giving readers a bunch of cool features, but in reality, you’re likely distracting them from what they came for.

You can use a heat map tool to help you see how readers are actually using your website, and decide what to cut.

By honing in on exactly what most readers are looking for — your awesome content — and showing only that, you’ll see more engagement with the users who are actually using your sidebar, and additional benefits from those who aren’t. Namely:

We live for page speed at Mediavine, and sidebar widgets can be killers.

Image-heavy widgets, or widgets that call external services to display top Pins, Instagram photos, etc., can cause serious delays in page load, with little to no user interaction to show for it.

The long and short of it: Running a widget for the sake of running a widget isn’t helping you or your audience. It’s harming page load, user experience and ad performance.

The Long and Short of it

So how short should you make your sidebar? To make a long story (and sidebar) short, less is more.

An About Us widget, search box, and/or a Popular Post widget may be all you need. Our top-performing sites typically run just one sidebar widget.

With two sidebar ads, including one that sticks, we promise that’s more than enough. Users’ attention should be drawn to your content, not your sidebar.

Along those same lines, if you want to give your audience a call to action, do it where the majority of readers are most engaged – in your content.

That’s really where you should be targeting them to subscribe to your newsletter, follow your social media accounts, buy your products, and so forth.

Cutting out what you don’t need and focusing on prioritizing content better positions you for the long game, boosting user experience, page speed and ad revenue alike.

Optimizing Ads for Desktop Pagespeed

Much like the Optimize Ads for Mobile Pagespeed setting, our new Optimize Ads for Desktop Pagespeed setting feature prioritizes page speed by taking ads out of the first screenview. This can include the above-the-fold (ATF) sidebar unit, along with the leaderboard unit. Removing these can lead to larger declines in revenue than the mobile option, so use caution when activating this feature.

If you are still looking to further improve desktop site speed with this feature, we recommend adjusting your first sidebar widget so that your Sidebar ATF ad is actually below the fold on your site.

To do this, you would want to place a sidebar widget (or two short widgets) at the top of the sidebar that will effectively push the first ad “below the fold” and out of the first screenview. Please remember that if you make changes to your sidebar you will need to reach out to publishers@mediavine.com to have your ads retargeted.

Pin this post!

The post Rethinking the Sidebar: Less is More For RPM & UX Alike appeared first on Mediavine.

Techniques such as writing shorter sentences and paragraphs, using headings, formatting posts like an outline, and adding more images all help keep users engaged.

Today, we’re focused on how you can specifically take advantage of your Most Valuable Content (MVC) to maximize earnings, along with – you guessed it – SEO and user experience.

What MVC is, and Where to Place it

If readers visit your site looking for a specific piece of content, be it a recipe, a sewing pattern, a travel packing list or whatever your area of expertise may be, that’s what they’re after.

For example, if you use a recipe card as a food blogger, for How to Guides for your DIY or Craft blog, that is going to be your MVC.

Sounds obvious, right? Yes and no. The key is not revealing this MVC early in your post, or even in the middle, as a majority of visitors will consume that MVC and then bounce.

You’ll greatly enhance your RPM and the SEO value of your MVC by placing it at the bottom of your articles, and we’ll explain not only why but how.

Why the Placement of MVC is Crucial

As we’ve probably said more times than we can count, ad viewability and user engagement are both essential to your website’s long term performance.

If users are quickly scrolling, or worse, using a jump-to-recipe style button, then they’re skipping over most or all of your ads. Showing an ad that is not seen by the reader may not seem like a big deal, but over time, a decrease in ad performance will limit your earning potential.

Placing MVC at the bottom of your posts will ensure that users engage with it and maintain optimal ad viewability, but the rest of your content still plays a vital role as well.

Content Above the MVC Still Matters For UX, SEO

While MVC is, by definition, your most valuable content, you can’t just copy and paste it at the bottom and call it a day. If the content leading up to it isn’t serving a purpose, then readers certainly won’t be engaged with the material and may bounce even sooner.

MVC doesn’t mean only valuable content.

From the onset, use headlines and short, impactful paragraphs to make skimming readers consume content that supports your MVC along the way. Use unique images and visuals, not just the same pictures repeating from different angles.

Making sure that any material leading up to your MVC is engaging, relevant and supportive of it isn’t just good for user experience. This practice also offers significant SEO upside in terms of long-tail keyword juice and the improved rankings that follow.

Formatting Content After Your Post

As for items publishers often run after their MVC (calls to action, recommended content, etc.), these are great as long as you properly structure the article so that said items are outside of the CONTENT AREA of the post.

What do we mean by that?

When you mark up your HTML, or the underlying code underneath the post, you tend to designate main content area of your site in your template or theme.

In WordPress, the most popular CMS, this is defined as a div with the class name content-entry or post, etc. You can mark it up in other ways in Schema.org as well, but the important thing is that spiders, like search engines and Mediavine’s own in-content ad logic, learn where your content is.

If calls to action or “related content” items are included inside your post, then you’re calling that your actual content as well. We highly encourage using plugins that properly place these outside the main content area so that search engines know to index it.

As far as our in-content ad logic is concerned, you can always email us if you can’t fix this. We’ll update our code on the back end to identify your MVC, and just stop inserting ads after that.

The end goal of all of this is to make sure you’re not running ads where no one sees them, boosting ad engagement, viewability and long-term income.

The post Optimizing Your Most Valuable Content for Better RPM and SEO appeared first on Mediavine.

We’ve talked about online audience behavior at length in the past, and it’s why both Google and Usability.gov encourage you to use headings, or H tags, when writing content.

Short, web-friendly sentences and paragraphs are a great start, but heading tags are essential in organizing content and directing your users where to go while they’re skimming.

In fact, in Google’s SEO Starter Guide, they recommend you think about your content in terms of writing an outline. If you do, the headings you’re writing will begin to make sense.

The above link includes a list of things to do and things not to do; For example, don’t overdo it with headings, don’t use H tags for formatting, and only use them to structure a post.

Basically, use headings as you would in an outline of a paper.

What is a Heading Tag?

A heading tag is a tag element that looks like <h1></h1> in your HTML or Code editor, or what is labeled as Heading in your Visual or WYSIWYG editor.

A simple but effective way of looking at it is that it’s a marking in the HTML code which basically indicates that this content is more important than the rest of the text.

Using this code indicates to both your web browser and the search engines/other crawlers scanning your site that it’s important text, and conveys this to the user as well.

By definition, the Heading tag is visually displayed in a larger typeface and is typically bolded, depending on your theme’s stylesheets or formatting.

Note: You may have noticed a number in that <h1></h1> example above.

It turns out you can use numbers 1-6 next to the letter h to indicate the importance level of the tag. They’re actually in descending order, so H1 is the most important, down to H6.

H1-H6: Which H Tags Should You Use?

With six different options in H1–H6, or Heading 1–Heading 6, as WordPress calls them, which one(s) should you use in your blog posts?

First, start with your actual blog post heading: H1 is the most important thing on your page, so in a blog post, that should be the heading of your text.

You can confirm that your title uses an H1 tag by right clicking and choosing “Inspect Element” on Google Chrome. In the Elements tab of the Developer Tools that opens up, you’ll easily be able to determine which H tag your title is wrapped in.

If your theme currently has your website title set up as H1, that’s great for the homepage, but not the case for article pages. On those pages, the article title itself should be the H1.

If it’s not, there’s no reason to panic.

According to Google, multiple H1 tags is not a problem, and in certain cases on the semantic web, there are situations where second H1 tag is contained within a secondary element such as an <article> tag.

The point is to make sure your article title is, ideally, in an H1 tag, while subheadings should be in a header tag with a lower priority, such as <h2></h2>.

If you have a sub-sub heading below that heading? Use <h3></h3>.

How Headings Help with RPM

Okay, enough geeking out about which tags to use. You may be wondering why an ad management company like Mediavine is encouraging you to run header tags at all.

First, they help with SEO and user experience, and ads are just the beginning at Mediavine. You’ll always see us touting anything that helps with all aspects of your sites.

Here’s the crazy part, though: Purely from a technical standpoint, using header tags can actually improve your ad placements — and subsequently, revenue — as well.

When our script wrapper determines where to place in-content ads, it’s going to take into account header tags (if properly used) to determine your headings.

What we call our in-content logic uses just that — logic — so that it will NOT insert an ad between a heading and a paragraph, making sure to never disrupt the flow of your content.

However, if you’re just using bold text or other incorrectly marked up headings in lists or posts, the script wrapper will insert ads into potentially odd placements.

The last thing we want to do is detract from user experience. If a user is engaged with your content, they’re also going to be engaged with ads, which organically means a higher long-term RPM.

So please, use official HTML heading tags throughout content to organize and get the most out of content. It’s win-win-win for SEO, user experience and earning potential alike.

The post Improve RPM and SEO with Headings appeared first on Mediavine.

Uh… What the Heck is the Script Wrapper?

The script wrapper is our core piece of advertising technology, allowing us to deliver billions of ad impressions across thousands of websites and continually optimize them.

In the simplest of terms, it’s what optimizes placements on your page, runs real-time auctions, and ultimately tells our ad server, Google Ad Manager, what ad to serve and where.

Mediavine’s Script Wrapper also does a lot more behind the scenes.

We won’t divulge (or bore you with) the details of the secret sauce, but it lets us simultaneously optimize ads on individual site, placement, and user levels.

In short, it’s a pretty complex and important piece of code, and after three years of serving ads, we determined that our old Script Wrapper, 1.0, was starting to show its age.

We’ve changed a lot over the last three years, and in order to remain agile and maintain industry leading RPMs and CPMs, the Script Wrapper had to evolve along with us.

Why is Script Wrapper 2.0 Better?

Flexibility

Written from the ground up by our team of engineers to be faster – both in terms of delivering ads and for us to build onto – 2.0 is infinitely more flexible in nature.

Behind the scenes, this makes our ad tech much easier to maintain and improve, allowing us to make improvements and launch new features a whole lot quicker.

Advanced A/B Testing

Testing is now built into the core of Script Wrapper 2.0, which uses big data and machine learning to allow us to experiment and run A/B tests across all our sites and/or individual ones.

We’ll still always test everything on our own sites, including The Hollywood Gossip and Food Fanatic, before making changes that will impact the entire community.

Now, however, we’re able to test new ads and technological changes on small percentages of traffic across our group of publishers, giving us better data more quickly.

Speed

Maybe you noticed that Mediavine is obsessed with page speed.

Well, the good news is our engineers are the same way with the Script Wrapper, and 2.0 has been optimized for speed in so many more ways than 1.0 ever was.

The most exciting of these changes is the fact that 2.0 now takes advantage of the fact we’re live on nearly 4,000 sites by leveraging what’s called “browser caching.”

Most of Script Wrapper 2.0 is now bundled together into one file that can be cached across multiple sites. In other words, if a user visits two Mediavine sites, they don’t have to re-download it.

That means sites and ads load significantly faster.

Also, 2.0 will let us run pages faster outside of browser caching with a new “Mobile Page Speed” optimized setting that we’re building for publishers as obsessed with page speed as us.

There’s also plenty of features coming to speed up auctions and pages for publishers that don’t opt for that aggressive new setting.

Performance

Likely the most important improvement is that 2.0 is just going to perform better.

What does that mean? Initial testing has indicated that 2.0 performs between 10-20 percent better on most publishers’ sites, and that’s before we even added any new features.

What does that mean? The long and short of it is that it all boils down to speed, and a likely 10-20 percent boost to RPMs is just the beginning.

If you haven’t seen that 10-20 percent boost yet, don’t worry. This went live only last week, and we have plenty in the works that should make sure all sites see a boost.

But my Ads Look the Same!

Yes they do. We’re really proud of that.

We actually launched 2.0 in the middle of last week, and the fact that nearly no one noticed is a great sign. The goal of 2.0 was to first replace 1.0, feature-for-feature.

The fact everything looks the same and you didn’t notice is a positive. Your site and its ads should be identical, only faster and better-performing.

Now Comes the Fun Part …

Growing this rapidly in the last few years has been exciting, and even though you didn’t notice it, the launch of Script Wrapper 2.0 marked an especially important milestone.

The launch of our new ad tech is emblematic of our company’s evolution since 2015, and the final transition to an incredible engineering team that made this happen.

We’d like to thank all of you for your patience and trust in Mediavine as we’ve worked on this, both in building this amazing group and the product suite that came with them.

With the right people and technology in place, we can’t wait for the exciting things we can build now. We’re going to have an amazing Q4, and even better, it should be the first of many.

The post Mediavine Script Wrapper 2.0 is Live! (Here’s What That is and Why it’s Awesome) appeared first on Mediavine.