EVERYONE KNOWS Google provides tools to help you advertise your site and also advertise on your site.

But along with the marketing aspects, Google provides numerous other tools that are often over-looked, and could be utilised for your own presence on the World Wide Wibble.

Today we'll be looking at a variety of different methods of marketing available to Google users, using our active example site UK Cigar Forums, and within the follow-up article we'll be examining the additional tools you can use to hone your advertising, and increase the effectiveness of your site.

Advertising on your site
First up, a useful source of revenue is always going to come from advertising, and a good first step in incorporating advertising on your site is to utilise Google's ads.

Google calls this service 'Adsense'.

You can sign-up to Adsense here. The two most useful services for basic sites are 'Adsense for content' and 'Adsense for search' - the latter is covered below.

Adsense for content allows you to customise what adverts Google will put on your site, by keyword.

You can simply choose from categories of words which Google will then utilise to index against running ad campaigns. This means ads can be targeted to your users, which should mean more clicks and revenue for your site.

Once you've chosen your words, Google will literally give you the code snippet to use within your website. This is a Javascript snippet and can be easily embedded within any HTML page.

You can re-login to Adsense at any time and see how many clicks you've received, and any revenue associated with the click-through.

Currently our test site uses the ad revenue to advertise further on Google (see 'Advertising you site' below), meaning the site is run as a no-profit site, and it pays for its own advertising costs.

Below you can see a screenshot of a Google-created advert banner, and beneath it a customised Google search input box.

Customised Google search
Secondly, you can also add a Google customised search on your site, which can either allow users to Google the web or, more effectively, index your site and allow users to do a site-search.

This is a powerful feature that Google is giving away free, and search is often a necessary requirement on even small web sites.

Again, sign-in to Adsense choose Adsense for search and grab the code-snippet for embedding into your HTML page - and hey presto you have an instant Google-powered search engine on your site, all for free.

Not only that, but the ads embedded into the search results will earn you revenue.

Below you can see the tailor-made search results from our test site.

Advertising your site
Google employs a service called 'Adwords' to advertise your site, on the Google search engine and other sites employing the advertising mechanism we set up above.

Simply going to this URL and signing up to Adwords will start the ball rolling.

From here, you can select and choose a variety of key words that you want associated with your advertisements.

You also get to choose your advert - containing a header, small two-line ad, and a link.

You can then choose how much you want to spend on ads per-month, and can choose from a selection of payment methods.

Below you can see a typical Adwords setup, with a variety of Adwords selected for use with Google.

In part two we'll be looking at Google Analytics and the wealth of Google tools available for your site and domain. µ