Google just released a bunch of innovations to AdWords ads aimed at getting better targeted advertising that will drive more traffic to your site. A number of Ad Extensions have been introduced in limited release so that AdWords advertisers can include maps, videos, product listings, multiple address listings, and “Click to Call Extensions,” which is in full release (not beta). With a Click to Call Extension, when someone searches and gets one of your ads on their iPhone or other smart phone, they’ll be presented with a phone number for your business. They can choose to click on the phone number to call the business, or click on the URL to go to your website. You’re charged the same whether they reach you by phone or by URL.

The other extensions are in limited or beta release, and all of them look to be worthwhile. For example, Ad Sitelinks can hook up someone searching on a product not necessarily on your landing page, but possibly on a more relevant page deeper in your site, such as a gift registry page. You’re only charged if the searcher clicks through to your site from the ad, not if they expand the Ad Sitelinks plus box and don’t click through. The official Adwords Blog breaks it down for you, including a new feature called Search Funnel, which lets you manage your advertising data in almost countless ways so you can figure out what’s working and what’s not.

In short, paid content doesn’t affect short term SEO that much, but it does leverage domain gravitas and long-tail search results by buying up authoritative domains (such as Demand Media’s purchase of eHow.com), and filling it with content that may not get searched often, but when it does, they have a good shot at being number 1 in the results.

Google wants websites to use nofollow tags to clamp down on spam comments and spam entries in guestbooks. But they don’t want sites to use nofollow tags to direct their “link juice” toward new or struggling internal pages of their own sites. And Google has convinced some of the hot sites right now (like Twitter) to make all the links from people’s bio pages nofollow, even if that person has Tweeted his or her heart out to build a real following with real content. As you might surmise, there are lots of Twitterers who resent this.

Google has not yet figured out a way of teasing out the sites that are using paid content to hedge their search engine bets for obscure searches, but I’m sure they’d like to figure out a way to do so. Google’s steady drum-beat is “content is king,” and though adaptations like the nofollow tag may have their usefulness in squashing comment spam, Google really can’t blame webmasters for learning to use these adaptive tools to help their own sites.

Check out some of the updates to Google’s Webmaster Tools. The one that is making the biggest impression is the new “Top Search Queries” feature that comes up on your Webmaster Tools dashboard. You not only get a list of keywords, impressions, and click-throughs, you can find out where in the search engine rankings your page showed up for specific keywords. You can get a graphical representation of impressions over time periods that you can define.

You can in addition find out how many links there are to your site and where they’re from, you can find out if there have been any crawl errors. You can learn all about your internal links and statistics for your subscribers. A section under the “Labs” menu helps you gauge your site performance and walks you through installation of the Page Speed add-on for Firefox that gathers all kinds of data on how fast your page loads and what, if anything, you can do to make it load faster. This tool is likely to get some miles on it now that site speed has been added into the mix of things that determines website ranking.

Seriously, if you have a free or slow afternoon at work one day, you should go through each of the Webmaster tools and find out stuff about your site you might never have known.

You’ve no doubt heard the rumors and now you know it’s true: Google is using site speed as one of its over 200 factors in determining search engine rankings. Sure, we’ve all felt the frustration of waiting for a slow page – particularly if we’re using a mobile phone and all we want is the address of the place we’re going. On the other hand, there are sites that, for whatever valid reasons, load slowly. The webmasters of these sites are understandably unhappy about the new developments.

There are still several questions yet to be answered, including how Google will account for sites in other countries that only want to rank on their country’s version of Google and which may have slower load times in the U.S. Several users have complained that it is Google’s tools themselves (such as Google Analytics and Google AdSense) that slow their sites down, and they wonder whether having these Google features will end up penalizing their sites.

The truth lies somewhere between “We’re doomed” and “Hallelujah!” Google’s Matt Cutts says that fewer than 1% of sites will be affected by this new development. If you go to code.google.com, you can find several boots-on-the-ground ways of speeding up your site, all of which are Google approved.

Selecting a bunch of great, relevant keywords for your AdWords campaign is a solid foundation for ad dollars well spent. But you can make those keywords work harder for you by using negative keywords, exact match, and phrase match in addition to the default broad match your keywords assume.

Negative keywords will keep away clicks on your ads from people who are expecting something else entirely. For example, if you have a taxi service in Manchester, New Hampshire, you don’t want to pay for clicks from people in Manchester, England who are looking for taxi services, so you could use “England” or “UK” as negative keywords by simply placing a minus sign in front of them as you add them to your AdWords keywords. You can have up to 10,000 negative keywords with Google, and you don’t have to pay for them, so you might as well put them to work for you.

Exact match is the strictest positive match, because even slight variations on the phrase will not cause your ad to show up. You designate a keyword phrase as an exact match by placing square brackets around it. Phrase match is less strict than exact match, because the exact phrase plus other words will bring up your ad. To designate a word or phrase as a phrase match, put it in double quotation marks. Broad match is the default, and you don’t add any brackets, quotation marks, or other symbols to it. In general, with broad matches, you’ll get more click throughs, but fewer conversions due to a higher risk of non-relevant searches bringing up your ad.

Throwing your advertising dollars against the wall of the Google AdWords universe and seeing what sticks is not an effective strategy for targeting and managing your pay per click advertising. It sounds pretty simple at first: you tell Google what your monthly advertising budget is, the keywords you want, and draw up your ads.

But then, the keywords you want may be too expensive, so your ads don’t run much. So you have to choose other keywords that you can afford to bid on. How do you even know if your AdWords money is well spent? You’ve got two choices: hire an AdWords consultant, or get educated yourself. One costs money, and the other costs time.

The first thing to do is download the Google AdWords Conversion Tracking Guide and read it. It tells you exactly what to do to your site to be able to track AdWords conversions. After you digest this, consider downloading AdWords Editor software from Google. It’s a way to manage your AdWords account. You might want to consider enrolling in the Google Advertising Professionals program. It’s free, and if you spend a little time every day working through it, you’ll be able to manage your pay per click campaigns to their best advantage.

There’s not a whole lot of difference between what you do for SEO on Yahoo! versus SEO for Bing and Google. In all cases, fresh, relevant content, high quality inbound links, and judicious use of keywords will do the most good. But the good news is, you don’t have to sacrifice SEO best practices for one search engine to do well in another. In other words, engines don’t penalize for practices that other engines endorse.

The big don’ts are the same for all three of the major search engines. They all frown upon things like keyword stuffing, paid link schemes, and sites that are thin on content but thick with affiliate links. Stay away from these things, and all three of the major search engines will reward you for it. Yahoo! and Bing tend to place a little more emphasis on the age of your site than Google does, but in every case, being an older, more established site is an asset and not a liability.

Fortunately, you don’t have to apply SEO to your site with your Yahoo! hat on, then with your Bing hat, then with your Google hat. Best practices for SEO work for all three, and if there are smaller tweaks you want to employ to make your site more palatable to Bing or Yahoo! there’s no reason not to.

If you have a personal Facebook page, you can make one for your business. Business pages are accessed through personal accounts, but they’re very easy to set up. Businesses of every kind have Facebook pages, and they use them to engage fans and customers, run promotions, have polls, and generally making their business seem much more personable. There are truckloads of Facebook apps you can use on your page, which means that you don’t have to make them from scratch. Many Facebook apps are free, too.

It’s good for your site to have promotions and giveaways that are accessible from your Facebook page. These can drive all kinds of traffic to your site, boosting it as well. Polls are popular, as are links to YouTube channels. Some third-party apps require you to go to another site and set up an account, which is usually free. But the apps are easy enough to put on your Wall, or you can give them their own tabs.

You’re really missing out if you aren’t using Facebook to market your business. It is one of the easiest ways to do so, and chances are you already know people on Facebook that you can personally nudge toward your business page and ask that they become fans and sign others up. You don’t get the kind of “viral” spreading of your message on any other medium than social network sites like Facebook.

Sometimes it seems that all you ever hear about is off-site optimization. Build inbound links! Send out press releases! Etc.! But if you’re not doing everything you can with on-site optimization, including developing a comprehensive internal link structure, then the off-site stuff can only do so much.

You have control over all those internal pages on your site, so why not make the most of them? There is a lot you can do from within to help your site climb the SERPs. Start by getting rid of irrelevant secondary keywords. Limit outbound links to 10 or less to keep each page sharply focused. If you have a page with way more than that many outbound links, consider dividing it into multiple pages (which you should optimize as well).

There’s a lot you can do to improve the strength of your anchor text too, like making sure your main keyword phrase shows up once on the page and in the title. You shouldn’t optimize any page for more than three keywords, and pages that are too long should probably be broken down into multiple smaller, more focused pages. And don’t stuff keywords. There are some keywords that will flow naturally onto a page with no trouble at all, but there are others that will appear “stuffed” even to the untrained eye, and these don’t help your position on the SERPs.

Nail down the on-page optimization and internal link structure, and you give your off-site optimization that much more of a boost.

We’re always saying, basically, “link farms: bad.” And that’s true. Links swapped for the sake of getting links with no consideration of quality or relevance is the unprotected sex of the SEO universe. You do it at your own (considerable) risk. There are, however, a few sites that people join in order to find other sites like theirs that they can evaluate and exchange links with. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines basically say that this is OK as long as you don’t do it “excessively” (see screen shot).

What’s the definition of “excessive”? Ask yourself if you’d be asking for the link were there no such thing as Google. If Google didn’t exist, and you still would have deemed a link with the site to be a positive thing, then go ahead. Otherwise don’t. The problem with even the good link exchange sites is that usually the link juice you’d get from just one high quality site that you approached independently would probably trump five or six links from the other sites participating in the link exchange. So while targeted link exchange sites aren’t necessarily going to ruin your site’s ranking, they’re probably not going to help all that much either.