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.

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.

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.

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.

Don’t let the screen shot mislead you, however, according to a New York Times article, the guy with the enhanced listing already ranked number one on local listings. The enhancements are added to your listing wherever you may rank. Which means that if you ignore local SEO and your site is located somewhere in the bowels of the listings, it’s not going to get you anything. And if the program rolls out everywhere, will everyone and their brother buy an enhanced listing? If so, the enhanced listings won’t stand out at all.

Of course, there are some people who are predicting the end of organic search listings as we know them, because selling enhanced listings could lead to things like paying for rank, or turning the new program into a competitive bidding program like AdWords. If so, let’s hope that there’ll be an alternative search engine available for those who only want real, organic search engine results.

Personalized search also works on a broader basis when nobody is signed in. With web search history enabled even when nobody is signed in to Google, the search engine will generate results based on 180 days worth of web history, regardless of who went where on the web. And with signed-out personalized search, the individual sites that influenced the personalization can’t be listed, so even a fairly nosy person can’t deduce much from it.

Webmasters wonder whether personalized search will doom their SEO efforts or actually help them. For those who avoid any and all deceptive practices and who concentrate not just on keywords, tags, and all the minutiae of SEO but on providing top quality content, then personalized search will only help, because it will boost a site based on people reaching it and bookmarking it (or visiting it frequently), regardless of how they found the site.

What may end up setting Buzz apart from the others, however, is the geographical information that can be associated with Buzzes that originate from your mobile phone. If you happen to see a celebrity, say and wanted to share a picture you snapped with your Droid or iPhone, you could do it, and use Google Maps to give it a geographical tag.

It could potentially be an alibi killer as well. If you were to tell your spouse or the police you were at a certain place at a certain time, and someone had photographed you and geo tagged you at another place and another time, you could be totally busted. But with the exception of the geo tagging option, this isn’t that much more of an alibi buster than a regular camera phone with a date and time stamp.

Google has taken some flack for just how wide open the Buzz platform is, and it has already tightened some of the privacy settings. But it will take a little time to find out just how many novel uses this new platform can be put to.

While there are a few people out there who look at organic search results and probably don’t realize there’s a column of paid results on the page, and while there are a few people who wouldn’t know a Wikipedia entry if it came up and bit them, for the most part, people find both paid and organic search results interesting and relevant, with the slight edge going to organic search results.

The paid search results can drive short term traffic when well done, but if it is driving people to a site that’s not very good, then those ad dollars are not good investments. The site itself has to convince people to come back, and in order to do that, it needs to practice solid SEO practices and keep the content relevant, up to date, and interesting. Paid search results and SEO should both be a part of your website’s plan for growth, with SEO taking on a slight preference over paid results in your budget.

Fortunately, Google Webmaster Tools has a “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. On the Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on the “+” sign by the “Labs” link in the left hand column. When you do, you’ll see an option called “Fetch as Googlebot” as you can see in the first screen shot. Click on it, and it will download your site as the Googlebot sees it. (The tool is still buggy when it comes to interpreting PDF files, however.)

The second screen shot shows just a small part of what it sees. Even if you don’t know much about html, if you read through your results you can at least see if important parts of your site are making it into Googlebot’s “view” of your site. The main problems the Googlebot has is with Flash graphics, but there are workarounds for this.

Actually, the death of thin affiliates has been declared multiple times, and perhaps there’s something to it, but like the “corpse” in Monty Python’s “Bring Out Your Dead” sketch, thin affiliates say they’re doing fine, thanks.

However, in early January 2010 Google slashed the number of advertisers in some categories by 90%, clearing the way for those who create original products and original content. And that’s what it eventually comes down to, even for thin affiliates that make quick fortunes slinging affiliate sites all over the place: if you don’t have unique content, you’ll be roadkill on the information superhighway eventually.

The way to long term marketing success with Google has always theoretically been high quality original content, it’s just that now they’re backing up their words with some slash and burn tactics that make thin affiliates a shorter term proposition for most.