16 adsense optimized wordpress themes to maximize your contextual ads earnings

When I first started Dosh Dosh, I decided to use an Adsense Wordpress template that was designed with the primary goal of maximizing ad earnings. I wanted a Wordpress theme with distinct ad blocks so I can easily blend contextual or other types of affiliate ads alongside my main content.

As you probably know, effective ad placement is critical if you plan to make any significant amounts of money through Google Adsense or other contextual ad systems.

Using a blog template with distinct ad blocks and optimized ad placements will very likely help you increase your Click through rates and affiliate conversions. These customized blog designs are also known as Adsense Ready themes.

How are Adsense Ready Themes different from other blog templates?

A key element that is central to all Adsense Ready themes is their focus on integrating contextual ads around content. As you will notice, the ads and link units are carefully placed above, beside and below each individual post to maximize exposure and their click through potential.

Several themes will also allow you to easily place blocks of square ads within each post, which is one of the proven ways to receive the highest amount of ad clicks from the average blog visitor.

Here are some general characteristics of most Adsense Optimized themes:

Built in Adsense blocks for easy ad insertion.
Ads are active once the Adsense Publisher ID is inserted or changed
Optimized Ad placement, colors and types according to Google’s guidelines
Adsense linkunits and search are already included.
Search Engine Friendly. Post and category titles are used for page titles etc.

Why should I use Adsense Ready Templates?

The main reason why you should use an Adsense ready theme is convenience. You don’t have to sift through too much code and there’s no need to make major adjustments to the template’s form.

In many instances, all you need is to insert your Adsense publisher ID and you’re done. This will probably only take a few minutes, which can be a huge time and effort saver.

You can probably hack any other Wordpress template to include ads but they can be a hassle if you are unfamiliar with how to optimize your ad placement. Most of these templates are not terribly attractive but I think they are functional and their ad placement is pretty decent.

I think Adsense Ready templates are very useful when you own dozens or hundreds of niche websites which use credited feeds or free content. Niche websites with high paying keywords will be naturally more profitable when you use templates with optimized ad placements.

Dosh Dosh’s List of 18 Adsense Optimized Wordpress Themes

As far as I know, this collection of Adsense Ready themes is the largest online. I’ve included a link to each theme’s home page and as well as a direct download link for your convenience.

Some of the screen shots were taken from the websites referenced and others were screen grabs of blogs running the specific theme. If you know of any other Adsense themes I’ve missed, leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

All of the themes should be compatible with Wordpress 2.0+. Feel free to check the theme’s homepage for more information on compatibility and installation.

Recommendations:

All of the themes are pretty similar in function, but I’ve had particularly high click-through rates and ad earnings with several of them and so I’ll like to highly recommend ProSense (#1) and BlueSense (#2).

This post will be updated often and I suggest that you subscribe to my blog feed in order to receive free notifications when new themes are added.

1. ProSense | Download Prosense | ProSense Gray | ProSense Blue