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Welcome to the ineedhits Search Engine Marketing blog, where we share the latest search engine and online marketing news, releases, industry trends and great DIY tips and advice.

We encourage you to get involved in our blog community - so share your opinions and experiences by leaving comments on our posts.

If you're looking for help with promoting your website - check out our range of affordable search engine marketing services.

Tuesday, December 20

DIY Tip: Is Your Website Still Making You Money?

For most of you, your websites form an integral part of your business. Accordingly, you view getting potential customers to your website as the key to your business success. In reality, it's only half the picture.

Yes, search engine marketing and online advertising are vital to your online success, but once the customer gets to your website - converting them to sales and enquiries, depending on the nature of your business, is the ultimate goal. Evaluating your website's ability to convert visitors is often overlooked, and as 2005 draws to a close, it's a great time to conduct that long overdue website review. Below are some key considerations when evaluating the current effectiveness of your website.

Is it designed with the simplest user in mind?

Though the number of Internet users around the world is astronomical, not all of them have the latest and greatest technology. Design with small monitors and small computer power in mind.
User time is precious!

Users are very impatient. Always design web pages with quick load times in mind. The most amazing rich media content is useless, if it takes visitors too long to load and they navigate to a different website.
Focus on your message.

When designing your pages, remember to make your message the key. Don't let your web page elements distract the visitor from your main message - buying or enquiring about your product and/or services.
Add value where possible.

Make your site a valuable resource to your visitors. By adding additional information and resources, you will improve your perceived expertise and give them a reason to return regularly.
Easy navigation.

Always make navigation through your site user friendly. Use text links as well as graphics links to allow for non graphic based users. The easier they find what their looking for - the higher your conversion will be.
Keep it fresh and relevant.

Always keep the content of your web pages up to date. Regular refreshing of content keeps the user's journey interesting if they are regular visitors, and search engines will be more inclined to visit your site more often.
Copy is key.

We discuss this time and time again. Quality copy is essential to your success. Keyword rich copy with a strong marketing message is a must have. If you need some tips read: The Top 10 Copywriting Tips for Higher Search Engine Ranking
What is your competition doing?

Always keep an eye on what your competition are doing. To stay one step ahead, you need to know what they have done and what their plans are.

Well, that list should get your website review off to a great start. This is by no means the definitive list of website elements to review, but it will get you heading in the right direction, and more importantly, remember to review your site regularly to make the most of your online business.

Google Likely to Beat MSN to AOL Deal

It is widely anticipated that Google and AOL will announce that they have reached a deal involving an equity stake in AOL, an advertising and content partnership and joint development work.

If rumors are to be believed, Google has beaten Microsoft to form a strategically important partnership with AOL and will pay $1 billion for a 5% equity stake in AOL. In addition, AOL will be able to sell advertising on Google sites and promote AOL content in Google's search advertising, and Google and AOL will jointly work on the development of video search capabilities and share access to AOL's video library.

This development is a significant setback for MSN, who was hoping to win this strategic relationship up to a few weeks ago. MSN was hoping that an AOL partnership would lend its new search technology credibility and provide it with much needed market share. That AOL appears to have chosen Google over MSN not only damages MSN's search strategy, but shows that Google has supplanted Microsoft as the "safest bet" and preferred partner in the online search and advertising arena.

Technorati's Kitchen: Chef's Special - "Explore"

In a world where innovation and rapid product launches are the key to staying on top of the competition, the ability to test new ideas with your target market as the guinea pigs is not only vital for the producers, but a great insight for the end users. Google are famous for their Beta releases which are almost always a definitive hint of what's going to be released soon.

Technorati - the blogging search and tagging engine - have created their own laboratory for testing their latest innovations in blog technology - aptly named "Technorati Kitchen". Here David Sifri, the man behind Technorati, and his team allow people to try out the newest inventions and provide feedback before they make it to mainstream release.

The latest dish being served up in the Technorati Kitchen is "Explore". When you need access to the latest blog entries on a particular topic, Explore is designed to provide the most up-to-date entries that suit your search requirements. Unlike Google search, which seems to have no real concept of time relevance, "Explore" is designed with this as one of the key considerations. They refer to Explore as "A Newspaper front for any subject".

Bear in mind, "Explore" is only an "alpha" release at this stage. However, with the core objective of providing the most recent and relevant blog information, and the right feedback, it should be a main feature on the Technorati menu soon.

Tuesday, December 13

New: Yahoo! Answers Everything

Last week, Yahoo! launched a service that lets people ask any kind of question online and get it answered by another person for free. The new service is called "Yahoo! Answers", and instead of relying on search engine algorithms to find the information you are looking for, your question gets answered by volunteers. You might get more than just one answer and are able to rate the answers you get based on quality.

For Yahoo!, this is an expansion of their community based services. Instead of sharing photos like you can do on Flickr, Yahoo! Answers is about sharing information. Based on the quality of answers, the service allows users to emerge as knowledge experts if they provide consistently good answers.

The concept of humans answering questions online is in no way new. Google offers a similar service called "Google Answers", but Google's service is fee-based and relies on a group of approved researchers, not the general public for answers.

This is not completely ground-breaking stuff but an interesting addition to Yahoo!'s community tools - and if you need a five minute break from work, go and check out some of the questions and answers that have been posted so far. There's some weird and wonderful (and some very interesting) stuff there!

DIY Tip: How to use Alexa for Traffic and Competitor Information

Alexa website statistics regularly get quoted in articles talking about website popularity and website traffic, but not everyone knows about the wealth of traffic and competitor information that anyone can use for free. So what exactly is Alexa and how can it help your business?

What is Alexa?

Alexa Internet, www.alexa.com, has been around since 1996 and was bought by Amazon in 1999. Using the Alexa Toolbar, Alexa gathers information on the Web usage of all Internet users who have installed the toolbar. While the toolbar conflicts with anti-spyware programs, because it collects and transmits data on search habits, exactly this data allows Alexa to compile statistics on website traffic and related information. Less known but also very useful is Alexa's Wayback Machine, which is a searchable collection of archived web page copies, meaning that you can look at how a website evolved over time and view old screenshots from various dates.

What traffic and competitor information can you get?

If you go to Alexa and type in your website address, you can view traffic reach and traffic rank information over time. With the traffic rank, the lower your ranking, the better. For example, Yahoo has a traffic rank of 1, making it the most visited site on the Internet. MSN comes in second, with Google third. You can get this information for any website you want - so you can use this as a way to estimate how much traffic your competitors' websites are getting, and how their traffic changed over time. You can even graph a competitor's traffic rank compared to yours if you go into "Traffic Details". You can also check out the Internet's top sites by subject or language - great if you are looking at general trends.

"Related Links" shows you a listing of sites that your visitors also visited. This can assist in identifying competitors to watch or might alert you to sites that you should advertise on.

"Sites Linking in" gives you a detailed listing of sites linking to yours, which is an indication of the number of backlinks to your site and allows you to eyeball what types of sites are linking to you. You can get this information through other sources too, but I like that the Alexa list includes "Site Info" links for each of the sites linking to you, which lets you drill down and find out more about those sites easily.

The "Overview" page includes a high level summary of general site stats like the speed of your website compared to other websites, contact information, and also lists reviews if any have been posted.

Alexa Pro's:

To my knowledge, Alexa is the only free tool that offers this depth of traffic and site information for free. The Alexa pages are easy to navigate and are a great resource for monitoring your own site performance and your competitors.

Alexa Con's:

Alexa only collects information from users who have installed the toolbar, so the information you see is based on an (albeit large) sample of data and might not reflect actual performance completely accurately. While this is something you should keep in mind, I think potentially biased information is much better than none at all. The more users use the Alexa toolbar, the more accurate Alexa's data becomes, and I personally am happy to use the toolbar despite spyware concerns.

The toolbar is also useful in itself - you can see a site's traffic rank while you are surfing it, and the toolbar also includes four or five related links which are most likely competing sites. This is great for comparison shopping and research purposes.

Another thing that I've found is that some of the reviews can be outdated and might not present real-time feedback on a site. It also appears that competitors can manipulate the reviews quite easily, so take this information with a grain of salt.

Overall, Alexa is a great research tool and I highly recommend you check them out!

Trip Planning with Google Transit

Google has quietly beta launched a new service related to its mapping products and travel tools. Called Google Transit, it allows users to plan trips using public transport. The beta version is currently very limited and only available for Portland, Oregon. Without committing to a firm roll-out schedule, Google has indicated that it plans to make the service available for cities throughout the United States and internationally.

Many municipal transport authorities already offer some type of online journey planner, and anyone who has ever used these services knows how useful they are. The services can include all sorts of practical options and information, like being able to choose whether you want to travel only by bus, train, tram, ferry or are happy to use a combination of all available transport means. They can also include the exact measurements for any distances you might have to walk and let you sort results according to departure time, arrival time or quickest journey time.

Google isn't hugely sophisticated in terms of its Google Transit options yet, but has added some very useful features. Google Transit includes a map image of your journey complete with markers indicating transport changes, and you can choose whether you want to see you route on a map, satellite image or hybrid image.
Google Transit also calculates the cost of your trip and lets you email a link to your trip to yourself or friends.

What's in it for Google? With recent signs of Google's interest in mobile search, Google could be seeing Google Transit as a useful tool to gather information about travel patters and use this knowledge to better target local search advertising.

Tuesday, December 6

Google Calendar - Get Your Business Organized Online!

The world of online calendars has failed to dazzle of late, with no great innovations or revelations in recent times. It is one online tool that seems to have been flying under the radar of most big online brands. Well that's what I thought until rumors re-surfaced about Google's calendar.

The grapevine suggests that Google will make an announcement regarding the Google Calendar at the When 2.0 conference at Stanford University today (6th Dec 2005). Anyone who has been keeping an eye on their online calendar suggestions, would have noticed that the URL: http://calendar.google.com/ is live and linking to the Google homepage.

So with the release imminent, why would an online calendar be useful? Considering most of us use our own desktop calendar like Outlook, or alternatively use cell phones or PDAs for portable scheduling, why would an online calendar be of any use?

When the functionality to integrate with personal apps, web based email, set appointments, invite attendees, schedule resources, and all the other important calendar features is available on the fly, the freedom and convenience of a web based calendar makes extremely good sense.

It won't be the first web-based calendar in existence, with Mozilla and Yahoo! already having explored the space, but with the recent lack of innovations, here's hoping Google have something interesting up their sleeve.

Yahoo! Advertising Just Got Smarter

In the realm of sponsored search advertising, "cost per click" is the name of the game, and getting the greatest return on your investment is the main objective. The battle for clicks on the top keywords is just as fierce as the battle between the search engines to get your advertising dollars.

This constant challenge between the search engines has been the catalyst for many great innovations. Yahoo! has just jumped to the head of the class with their latest proposed offering. "The new, new thing at Yahoo!, even though we've had variations of this, is getting much more into behavioral targeting," Yahoo! Executive Vice President Greg Coleman told the Reuters Media and Advertising Summit in New York.

Traditionally, sponsored advertising has relied purely on keyword searches and geographic / demographic customer details for its targeting. Yahoo! has just upped the ante with behavioral based targeting. No longer will you just vie for the top keywords, but also the best time to display your ad within the customers search journey.

Yahoo! has been tracking a few types of customer behavior including traditional search queries, customer movement through Yahoo! sites and the actual ads clicked within their search experience. Though customer personal information won't be made accessible to advertisers, the ability to choose when your ad is displayed based on these variables will be a part of bid process.

This newest initiative will go a long way towards pushing search advertising towards being truly targeted. The more customer characteristics that can be tracked and used for targeting, the greater the ROI should be on search marketing. It's making the gap between online marketing and traditional mediums almost as big as the Grand Canyon. Yeah for smarter search!

DIY Tip: Image Maps on your Web Site

Images and graphics can be great additions to your web pages, and especially useful if they provide a basis for informing or directing visitors within your site. The challenge when using images is to make them as search engine friendly as possible. One of their uses that can cause issues within search engines is image mapping. An Image Map exists when one image has two or more links assigned to it.

Have you ever come across an image of a US map whereby each state has a different link pointing to a page dedicated to that state? On one hand, this image can be cut up into smaller, separate images that have one link each, but on the other hand, it can be one large image that has many links coded into it. It is the large map with multiple links coded into it (image map) that can cause problems for the search engines.

An Image Map is made up of complex code and it is this code that confuses search engines when they attempt to spider your web site. As was mentioned earlier, the same image can be made up of many smaller images, which removes the complex code, however, if it is used for navigation purposes, search engines still cannot index images or text on an image, as they are designed to look for HTML text and not read images.

If you would prefer to keep the Image Map on your site, the easiest and most effective search engine optimization technique, is to create a site map using standard HTML hyperlinks to link to every page on your site. After doing this, add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links back to the site map. This will allow the search engines' spiders to go through your entire site with ease and lead to better chances of search engine indexing and higher rankings!

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