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My partner Steve is one of those people who can go through an entire day totally focused on what he's doing to the almost total exclusion of everything else. He can look at things like images or even statistics and not notice the obvious. He can read reports and if they don't have much relevance to what he's focused on then he can miss even the most obvious points that the author of the report is trying to make.

Heck he can even go into a store to buy something and not notice that the female behind the counter is flirting with him.

Sometimes that can be quite frustrating for me because there are times when what he misses can make a world of difference to us or to one of our clients. In many ways Steve, when he's in one of those very focused moods, can be just like the surfers who hit our websites looking for all the good free porn that we're silly enough to provide.

Those guys and girls are on the hunt for just one thing and so our marketing messages won't even register with them as they skim across the pages. That means that we really have to make those marketing messages stand out and some recent comments from Google's Chief Economist just go to reinforce that need to make our marketing jump off the page.

It seems that Google has found that it doesn't really matter a great deal where an ad is placed because the conversion rates are about the same regardless of position. If you've been around for a few years you'll probably remember all the suggestions that Google used to give webmasters on the best places to position their Adsense ads but now the figures are in and it really doesn't seem to matter.

So perhaps for us, unless your marketing message does jump off the page, it really doesn't matter where you put your ad ... it's probably not going to work any better in one spot than another. Now that does raise some interesting questions because the thinking in this industry used to be that you always placed your best ad at the top of the page because that's where it got noticed but maybe things have changed.

Perhaps now we need to start thinking about places where people will see our ads and to find the spots that work best for you may take some testing over some period of time. If it were me I would still try that top spot right up at the head of the page just because I'm not completely sure that what doesn't work for Google won't work for me. I think I can make some more eye-catching text ads than what Google provides.

Another place I would be testing would be very close to the entry button on your free sites. Of course the link lists that you're going to depend on for traffic have rules about what your entry link must look like but I'm sure you could put something near that entry button that would be noticed and would be very effective

So how do you get people to notice your ads? Well for some years now I've been a big fan of text ads rather than banners. Text ads don't have to be huge ... if you know the right words to use you can plenty of surfers clicking through to your sponsor with just five or six key words.

I've talked about using power words before to attract attention to your marketing message so I'm not going to go into those again. Instead I would encourage you to think outside of the box with what to add to those power words to encourage more people to click through to your sponsor.

But there's also something else that even Steve has noticed recently. When we were doing some SEO work for a mainstream client ... on a site that someone else designed ... we found that on one page the most clicked link was an image that wasn't obviously a link.

It seems that people were mousing over the image ... it was a rather appealing image too ... and when they discovered that it was a link they clicked on it. Now this was on a page were there were five or six very obvious links but none of those obvious links came anywhere near the number of clicks that one image attracted. And that image was on the right hand side of the page ... an area that, according to eye-tracking studies, surfers often miss.

We're not the only ones who have noticed that images are attracting people who are looking for a link. I recently read a post by someone who closely monitors clicks and mouse overs on his sites and he found that many more people were mousing over the images in the Adsense image ads (which aren't clickable) than were actually clicking on the text link that goes with those images.

So why not place one or maybe two small images on your sites and have them linked to either your sponsor or somewhere that you can do some harder sell to get the surfer through to your sponsor?

Of course, if you're relying totally on link lists and TGPs for your traffic then you can't have blind links but there are ways to incorporate those images into quite noticeable links so that it satisfies the requirements of your traffic sources.

And as you experiment with new ad placements and different types of ads be sure to have some form of analytics in place to see what really works for you. It really does pay to notice the important things about your web pages.