or , you can usually place your ad code inside that and have it appear in the header. In the following example, the ad will appear just under your blog name:

<>

Other Themes, often based on the Default WordPress Theme, create the header by assigning the header class/id to a headline tag that is wrapped around the title. If your Theme does that, you will likely need to place the advertising code below the Header in the content or comparable section.

 

   

    
       
   
     

       
     
  


<>

Play around with the placement to get it in the appropriate place dependent upon your header design and layout. Be sure and validate your page afterwards to ensure the placement works.

Ads in The Sidebar

You can add ads to the sidebar by editing the sidebar.php template file. The standard WordPress sidebar template file features a complex nested list, so take care not to disturb the nest. You can carefully integrate ads into the list, or restructure the list to remove the nesting feature if the ad’s code interupts the list format. Or add the ads to the top or bottom of the nested list, skipping any possible coding conflicts. To include the code inside of the list, you may need to put your advertisers code between a pair of

tags or your page will not validate and may not look right. For example, you may want to include an ad between the Pages and Archives in your sidebar:

Pages' ); ?>
 
<>
 
Archives
    

    
    
 

Inside the Content Template

Multiple and single page views use different template tags to generate the “content” section of a web page in WordPress. All may be generated with the index.php template file, or only multiple post views will use it while single post views will use the single.php template file. If you want ads to appear on these different views, check your WordPress Theme to find out if your Theme uses different template files to display the different web page views.

In general, look for the WordPress Loop as your focal point for placing the ads. It begins with code that looks typically like this:

Placing code just after this will generally place the advertising above each post’s content. On multi-post views, the ad will be generated at the top of each excerpt or post, such as on the front page. On single post views, the ad will be at the top of the post.

The the_content() is the template tag that returns the post content. Placing advertising code just before or just after this will put your code as close as possible to the “guts” of the post.

<>

Ads Near Comments

The Comment code at the bottom of the posts produces the link to the Comment page. Place your advertising code just before this to have it appear ahead of the Comment link.

For standard comments, to place your ad just over the comment link look for something like this:

<>
Comments to this post

If you use popup comments:

<>
 

Placing ad code on the Comment Page is an effective way to get an extra ad without violating your program’s TOS agreement, limiting the number of ads per page. To add comments to your comment section, on the single post view or popup comments page, comments.php or comments-popup.php such as:

comment_status) : ?>
Leave a Reply

<>


You must be logged in to post a comment.

This example will place the advertisement just below the “Leave a Reply”.

After the First Post

Some advertising programs limit the number of ads per page, so you may need to only include ads after the first (or second or third) post. Here is an example:

1. Edit index.php of your current theme.
2. Look for:

3. This is called The Loop. Its purpose is to display posts. Just BEFORE that line, insert this code:

4. We’ve just created two variables, $postnum and $showads. The first will be incremented for every new post displayed. The second variable ($showads) is the number of posts you want to display before seeing ads. Next, find this code:

5. That line is the end of The Loop. Just BEFORE that line, add this:

    <> 

6. Make the appropriate changes such as inserting the advertiser’s code where noted. The $showads variable can be changed from ‘1’ to whatever post you want it to display after.
7. Save the file.

Here is a simple example. It will show ads after the 5th post of a page.

   
    <> 

  There are no posts!

Ads in Feeds

Before placing ads in Feeds, check your advertising program’s TOS as some advertisers do not allow this. Two options for placing ads in Feeds are Kanoodle, which produces a substitute feed including contextual ads, and Feedburner, which produces a substitute feed that can include context sensitive ads and automatically insert your Amazon Associates ID into existing links to Amazon products.

Ads in Individual Posts

Placing ads in individual posts can be done by simply including the code in the post in some cases. To include ads powered by PHP will require a plugin to allow the code to be executed. RunPHP and PHPExec let you embed dynamic PHP code and PHP based advertising in individual posts. To use Javascript-based ads in individual posts, see Using Javascript.

Adding Style to Ads

You may want to use some simple CSS to wrap the post around your advertising. In this example, the ad will appear in the upper right of each post, with the post text wrapped around it.

 <> 

Of course, you can also create styles for ads in your stylesheet.

Plugins for Advertising

There are a variety of WordPress Plugins that can assist you in adding advertising to your WordPress site. For a general list of all of them, see the Advertising Plugins List.

Cg-PowerPack Includes the CG-Inline plugin and CG-Amazon

CG-Inline is a powerful macro system for embedding auto-generated items within your posts/articles. In combination with CG-Amazon, allows for quick insertion of Amazon links/images within a post. Flexible image inlines, for floating/embedded thumbnails or image links. Powerful permalink creation. CG-Amazon provides live Amazon data feeds, product links, wishlist links, keyword lookups, all product types/catalogs, article inlined and sidebars, keyword lookups, admin interface and caching system.

MooseCandy

Adds content before specified posts (ex: an advertising banner between 1st and 2nd post).

WP-Amazon

Search and include items from Amazon.com to your post entries. This plugin adds a link called “Insert item from Amazon.com”? on the post page. This link launches a search window which allows an author to search for items from Amazon.com to be included on the author’s post entry.

Adsense Beautifier

Adsense beautifier is a plugin available for WordPress to make your Adsense look beautiful in order to increase you Adsense earnings. Images adjacent to ads can help increase click through rate (CTR).

Troubleshooting Ads

If you are having trouble with your ads, here are some possible solutions.

Why Aren’t My Ads Showing Up?

In many cases it has nothing to do with WordPress, but here are a few things to remember or questions to ask yourself:

1. With the context sensitive ad services, often the reason is that the keywords for context sensitive ads come from a search engine. Try a search for the URL where the ads should appear in the associated search engine and if the URL is not indexed, you will not get ads.
2. Many ads use Javascripts. Some of those scripts do not validate correctly and some of them may behave oddly with certain stylesheet features or even with other scripts on the same page.
3. Doublecheck your placement. For example, if you included the ad code in the Post section of the Main template file and now you are looking at a Page instead of a Post.
4. Are you running a firewall, ad blocker or other software that may block the ad code? Do you have Javascript enabled in your browser? If the ad uses Flash or another plugin, do you have the required plugin installed?
5. Try a thorough reload of the page. Clear your browser cache and cookies. Shut down your browser. Restart the browser. Load the page.

All I Get are Ads for Blogs

Context sensitive ads spider your site and index the keywords. If your site is heavy on words and links related to blogging, you will get lots of ads related to blogging. There are two things you can do to improve this. First, eliminate unnecessary blogging references. Second, make longer, keyword rich posts. Posts over 250 words tend to produce better context sensitive ads.

If you are using Google’s Adsense and having this problem, you may be able to see some improvement by using section targeting.

I Get Different Ads on Different Pages

If you find you are getting different ads at example.com/index.php than from the URI example.com, this issue with context sensitive ads may be because the search engine reads these as two separate URLs and may index them on different days.

The URL with index.php may be read by the search engine more or less often than the same page without the index.php. Once both are properly indexed, the ads should match — at least for a while. The only solution, other than time, is to do everything you can to eliminate the use of the index.php in links, etc. A similar situation can occur with www.example.com reading differently than example.com without the www.

My Sidebar is Off the Page

These issues are generally related to XHTML and CSS validation. Check that your site validates as there may be a lost or unclosed tag.

The Ads Confuse Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer is not 100% standards compliant, so even if everything validates, you can still have problems. You may want to look at CSS Fixing Browser Bugs and you may also want to consider using conditional style sheets to direct Internet Explorer to its own stylesheet.

Resources

• The Big Secret to Ad Placement
• Heat Map for Best Ad Placement
• Advertising Tips
• SCORE – Use the Most Valuable Real Estate on Your Web Site To Capture Your Visitors’ Attention

Source: User:Tomhanna/Adding Ads to WordPress WordPress Codex