For those of you who often wondered why Google Adwords did not show your ads for a particular keyword, they have introduced a new feature that they say provides one-click troubleshooting for this problem.

While the magnifying glass that now appears next to the keyword in the Google Adwords dashboard provides basic information about your ad, I believe that Google needs to provide more information than just “This keyword has a low Quality Score, so the minimum bid exceeds your current maximum cost-per-click (CPC).”.

I am sure that over time the Google Adwords team will provide more information using this bubble cause this feature has the ability to make adwords campaign management easier than it is today.

Along with PPC, affiliate marketing is fast becoming one of the more popular methods of promoting businesses online. An affiliate marketing program basically consists of an affiliate and a merchant. The affiliate displays the merchant’s banners and sends visitors to the merchant’s site. In return he is paid by the merchant for every sale that is generated through the visitors sent by him.

So is affiliate marketing a better option to PPC? Well, one of the biggest differences between PPC and affiliate marketing is the action that you pay for. While you pay for every click in the PPC model, in affiliate marketing one only pays for each conversion (sale or lead generated). Hence, the merchant only pays performing affiliates and never incurs a loss as such. In PPC he has to pay for every visitor, irrespective of the final conversions.

On the flip side, setting up an affiliate program is more complicated and takes longer. Further, one needs to continuously monitor their affiliates’ performances and watch for competitors who may try to woo the affiliates away by offering a better commission.

Both, PPC and affiliate marketing have their pros and cons… While PPC can be easier to set up and manage affiliate marketing, if managed well, can lead to much better return on investment.

Today, search engines play a very important role in getting traffic for a website. Even big sites like Amazon and ebay are trying to improve their search engine placement by working on their internal site structure and pages.

A case in point that shows how important search engine rankings are for bigger sites is ebay. WayBackmachine shows that the title of Ebay’s front page in Jan 2001 was “eBay - Your Personal Trading Community”. Compare this with today’s title that incorporates their primary keywords - “eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices”.

Further, the ebay product pages are now all without querystrings (i.e. - all the pages have their URL rewritten thus enhancing spideribility).

There are a few very simple things that can be done to improve your search engine placement -

1 - Make sure you have unique titles on every page. The title should be crisp but should contain your keyword.

2 - Have a short meta description in place. Again this concise description should contain your keyword.

3 - Its best to use text links to link all your pages. If you have a flash or JavaScript navigation panel, try to link those pages using text links that can be placed at the bottom of your page.

4 - Write unique content. Spiders like to see unique content that offers information about your products and services.

5 - Upload pages close to the root directory. A simple site structure with pages close to the root (www.domain.com/directory/, www.domain.com/directory2/) enhances chances of getting spidered quickly.

6 - Get links from similar sites and link to sites that will offer value to your users

7 - Submit to DMoz and other major directories

Though just doing the above will not help you get search engine placements for really competitive keywords, they are steps essential for every site and would give you a good advantage over other sites right from the day your site is launched.