Are you ready to earn money from Google? If so, then you’ll want to make sure that your site is ready before you apply for Google AdSense and start placing ads on your site. Otherwise, your site may not be approved for Google AdSense. To ensure that your site is ready to start earning with Google AdSense, here's a checklist of items to start with.

Does your site provide a good user experience?

Whether you’ve created a blog, forum, or static informational site, your site needs to be ready for visitors to have a quality experience. This means providing your visitors with valuable content that is relevant, aesthetically pleasing, and engaging.

In addition to quality content, Google will be looking for user experience elements like transparency and trustworthiness, ease of navigation, and quick page load times. So be sure to provide easy-to-find contact information (your name, a contact form, and an email address at minimum), a clear navigation bar, and a fine-tuned site that loads as quickly as possible.

Test your site to see how quickly it loads and what elements may be causing a strain on your page load times. This tool will let you test your site on desktop and mobile browsers so you can clear up any issues that would hurt your user experience.

What type of content does your site have?

Google AdSense is a family friendly network. Our publishers trust that the Google network will provide high quality brand advertisers, high cpcs and cpms, and coverage across a large number of topics. All of our policies are designed to ensure that we maintain both publishers’ and advertisers’ trust in our network. You can refer to the general Google AdSense policies or Google AdSense content policies page for more details on the types of content that’s prohibited on our network. If your site has content that violates our policies, you won’t be able to monetize your website with AdSense.

Does your site adhere to Google Webmaster Guidelines?

One of the pitfalls some site owners fall into when they begin to research ways to monetize websites is finding bad advice about ways to promote their site. When your goal is to earn money from Google via Google AdSense, you should follow Google Webmaster Guidelines

In a nutshell, these guidelines set a standard for site owners to properly promote their sites using tools that Google has provided (such as the Google Search Console and Google Analytics), quality content, and organic link earning versus link schemes.

Does your site have a privacy policy?

Something that some site owners don't think about, until they are asked for it, is a privacy policy. It’s a page on your site that explains to visitors how their data is handled or used when the site uses certain programs such as Google AdSense, Google Analytics, and other services that may collect their information.

Google suggests creating a privacy policy that discloses any use of data in regards to Google services on your site or creating a prominent link on your site to How Google uses data page. In addition, Google suggests creating a disclosure in your privacy policy of any third-party vendors, including Google, that use cookies to serve ads and informing users that they have the option to opt-out of third-party ad serving.

They recommend using the Network Advertising Initiative as a resource for learning more on how to draft your own privacy policy. In particular, their FAQ offers an answer to the question of how detailed should your privacy policy be.

Best practices to avoid a policy violation with Google AdSense?

Here are a few of the most common policy violations that can be easily avoided and enable you to monetize your website with Google Adsense.

• Don't click on your own Google AdSense ads or encourage / incentive visitors to click on your Google AdSense ads.
• Don't receive traffic from certain sources, like paid-to-click programs, unwanted emails, or display ads from automated software applications.
• Don't modify AdSense code to artificially inflate ad performance.
• Don't place too many AdSense ad units on a page, and you don't utilize AdSense in certain ways, such as in pop-ups, emails, or software.
• Your site must not perform certain user experiences, such as redirects to unwanted websites, initiate downloads, include malware, or contain pop-ups that interfere with the user's ability to navigate throughout the site.

If you think your website is ready to earn money with Google AdSense, sign up here for Google AdSense and visit our Help Center to learn more about getting started.