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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.

Monday, July 31

Yahoo! Unveils New Search Crawler (Slurp)

Yahoo! recently announced the launch of a new faster, more efficient crawler. The new Yahoo! Slurp (as it's known), is designed to navigate through the web quicker than its predecessor and in the process uses 25% less bandwidth. Its launch has been met by mixed reviews from website owners.

You might have seen far more activity from the Yahoo! Slurp in your website logs as Yahoo! has been running the old and new crawlers concurrently over the past few weeks. The extensive testing is designed to ensure that the new crawler lives up to its expectations.

The launch of the new crawler was announced via the Yahoo! Search Blog. The blog post provided by David Simpson and Priyank Garg states:

"In addition to crawling the Internet faster, our new crawler is more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, site owners will notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the crawler.

Now, with the new crawler in full production, we have turned off the old crawler and site owners should see a much lower crawl load without a loss in content coverage."

This is good news for website owners, as each time the crawler visits your website it utilizes your bandwidth when indexing your web pages. For owners with small bandwidth website hosting, these savings will be appreciated.

That said, Yahoo! suggests that the new crawler will inevitably lead to some changes to rankings and reshuffling of pages within their results. So it is highly recommended that website owners check their listings in Yahoo! search.

Initial reviews about the new slurp have been mixed. While some website owners are happy with the drop in crawl load to their sites, others are not overly impressed with the changes to rankings and results evident from the new crawler. Give the new search results a whirl and share your thoughts on Yahoo!'s new crawler and results.

Webzari: Yahoo!'s New Way to Visualize Inbound Links

The Yahoo! Search blog has highlighted an interesting new extension of Yahoo!'s Site Explorer functionality that might have been missed in the English speaking world - because it's written in Korean.

Site Explorer was launched in 2005 and can be used to see how many and which pages of a website have been indexed by Yahoo!'s search engine. It also provides information on inbound links for a site.

Yahoo!'s team in Korea has used Site Explorer's inbound link data and visualized this information. With Webzari, other sites linking to a site are represented by cutesy little planet drawings. If you mouse over the planets, you get more information about the link; if you click on a planet, you'll see a snippet of the actual text containing the link. Korean users can even save their Webzari searches in the Korean version of My Web.

It's pretty difficult to assess this tool when you can only read a fraction of the information on the page, but Webzari certainly seems like a very user-friendly way to present inbound link information visually instead of just showing endless lists of URLs.

Yahoo's Korean team has put a lot of effort into the visual details of the map, including a night sky backdrop with stars and flashing comets, little house icons on the planets that even have smoke coming out of the chimney, and little space rockets zooming around when you move your mouse from planet to planet (see the screenshot below from the Yahoo! Search blog). As far as I know, this type of design detail appeals to the taste of Korean Internet users - and it certainly also appeals to the kid in me.

From what I could tell, the displayed sites seem to be skewed towards Korean content and Korean sites with inbound links to your site are listed first. It would be great to have an English version of this visualization tool to be able to explore it more!

Google AdWords: More Click Fraud Transparency

Google has enhanced the available reports in Google AdWords to include information on invalid clicks and and invalid click rates per campaign.

The invalid clicks and invalid click rate figures give advertisers an idea of how many clicks Google filtered out as invalid before charging the advertiser for them. This is nothing new: Google routinely filters out invalid or fraudulent clicks before advertisers are charged for them. The only difference is that they now tell advertisers exactly how many clicks are filtered out for each campaign.

This information can be quite helpful in itself: For ineedhits' own Google AdWords campaigns for example, the invalid click rate ranges from 3.96% to over 16%. It will be interesting to investigate how the invalid click rate relates to conversion rates for the individual campaigns. Will a high reported invalid click rate for a campaign be inversely related to the campaign's conversion rate, indicating that there might be a lot of undetected click fraud, or will it be positively related to conversion rates, indicating that Google was able to identify most of the invalid and fraudulent clicks?

While these figures are now being reported and more transparent, they don't address the more pressing problem for advertisers; that is, how many invalid or fraudulent clicks they ARE being charged for.

Some estimates have put the percentage of fraudulent clicks being charged to advertisers as high as 14%. If you add this figure onto the amount of detected invalid clicks, it may well indicate that one fifth to one quarter of the entire click volume generated by paid search advertising could be invalid.

To view your invalid click reports, select the appropriate tick boxes in Google AdWords' "Campaign Report" reporting. What kind of numbers are you seeing?

Friday, July 28

Display-Search Approach Increases Your Conversion

Advertisers should consider combining search and display advertising in their search engine marketing campaigns, as a recent study by Atlas Institute reveals that on average conversion rates improve when both are incorporated together.

The study analyzed 11 advertisers which were grouped depending on the extent of their media exposure: search only, display only and both search and display. Atlas Institute observed 2.5 million search clicks (on paid search engine results only) and more than 10.8 million impressions from 1.8 million users, to determine that searchers exposed to both search and display advertising from the same advertiser converted 22 percent more than search alone.

44 percent of the sample tested who had clicked on text ads, were also exposed to display ads from the same advertiser. Esco Strong of the Atlas Institute suggests that this finding is significant enough for marketers to be considering this kind of approach in their search engine marketing campaigns.

Overall it was found that users shown only search ads converted 3 times the rate to those who were only exposed to display ads, whereas searchers exposed to both forms of ads converted four times as much as viewing display ads alone, resulting in a 22 percent increase over search alone.

Strong states that users that had exposure to both media types generally showed a higher search click to conversion rate, which meant that these consumers were more likely to continue with a purchase or sign up. Also of value for marketers was the individual search clicks performance - Strong points out the increasing costs advertisers face with paid search, and how display advertising can increase the return on ad spend on search and also justify those higher prices on specific keywords.

Possible explanations that suggest why this fusion of display and search ads is a winning combination include:

The ability for display advertising to generate brand awareness and increase purchase intent.
Display ads can help win consumers over that previously searched on a brand/product but never followed through with a purchase or sign up.
The possibility for display ads to drive brand searches.
Consumers who initially visit a site by clicking on a display ad may use search as a navigation tool to later return to the site.

These results also support research conducted by Yahoo! in 2005, which revealed that display advertising can have a significant impact on users' search behavior. In this study, the searchers that were exposed to Harrisdirect display ads performed 61 percent more searches on Harrisdirect related keywords. The same group exposed to these display ads also clicked through on Harrisdirect-related terms at a rate 249 percent higher than those who were not shown the display ads, and also clicked on links directed to their website at a rate 139 percent higher than those not exposed.

Tuesday, July 25

Ask.com Gives RSS Smart Answers in Search Results

Ask.com has recently announced the inclusion of RSS Smart Answers in their search results. Smart Answers are the answers you see at the top of the page above the actual search results.

According to the Ask.com blog, the Smart Answers will feature RSS feeds of the last 3 posts when searches are performed for particular blogs or feeds. The initial release is only providing the feeds from the most popular sources as determined by their Bloglines users, with more feeds promised in the near future.

While the initiative is a great start, it will become more useful as more feeds are added. The true value of the service will be achieved when relevant feed content is offered for searches beyond just actual blogs or feeds. Currently, results only appear when you search for a particular blog title (i.e. TechCrunch).

In the short term, it would be handy for greater drill down/search abilities to be included in the Smart Answers results. Links to Ask.com's blogsearch and even the ability to subscribe to the displayed feeds would be quick enhancements that improve Smart Answer's usability.

That said, it's good to see Ask.com setting the trend. None of the other major search engines like Google and Yahoo! have really integrated feeds into their search results. While some incorporate news content, there is still scope to give greater prominence to blogs and other user-generated content sources in search results. It's only a matter of time before they are!

Windows Live Expo - New Dynamic Social Listing Service

Microsoft has finally launched Windows Live Expo, its dynamic social listing service. In the same vain as CraigsList.org and Google Base, the service aims to provide users an online classified system for buying, selling, posting bulletins and all other classified activities.

The first sign that Windows Live Expo was officially open (post extensive beta testing) was the activation of the expo.org domain. While it still redirects to expo.live.com, the expo.org domain is a far stronger branding move than the existing Live sub-domain.

So what's special about Windows Live Expo?
Live Expo is embracing the power of social influence by allowing users to view, rate and discuss listings within the site. With the increasing value placed on peer/community suggestion, it seems only logical that the Live Expo's listing service would facilitate the same feedback and review mechanisms that other online services are offering.

Microsoft has also incorporated its mapping tools into the new listing service. This allows users to view where a listing is located at the click of a button. They can even get driving instructions with the inclusion of Live Local functionality.

Windows Live Expo also utilizes many of the other Windows Live / MSN tools to enhance the user experience. Members are able to create email groups from their Windows Live Messenger / email contacts, contact each other via IM, and post their listings to their MSN spaces.

The online listing/classified market is serious business with many consumers moving away from traditional classified services (i.e. newspapers) to the free online versions available. While all the majors are trying to get their piece of the lucrative pie, I wonder how long these listing services will remain free.

Monday, July 24

Google's and Yahoo!'s Results: A Vastly Different Picture

Over the past week, quarterly financial results have been released - and the picture they painted for the search engine giants Google and Yahoo! couldn't have been more different.

Yahoo! Disappoints

Yahoo! met analyst expectations but disappoints those who wanted to see the company's growth accelerate.
Quarterly profit dropped 78%, from US$755 million in Q2 2005 to US$163 million this quarter (this calculation excludes an extraordinary profit from Yahoo! selling Google shares one year ago).
Revenue increased by 26% to US$1.58 billion.
Earnings per share are US$0.11.
Yahoo! shares fell over 18% after the results were released. Overall, Yahoo! shares have fallen around 30% this year.

Google Shines

Google' results beat analyst expectations.
110% rise in quarterly profit, from US$343 million to US$721 million.
Revenue increased by 77% to US$2.46 billion.
Earnings per share are US$2.33, compared to US$1.19 a year ago.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt reiterates the importance of Google's international expansion.
Google regards Google Checkout as their most exciting product launch so far this year.
Suggestions that the online advertising market has peaked were rejected.
Google shares rose US$2.78 to $389.90 in after-hours trading.

What about MSN?

Microsoft's MSN business unit reported a fourth quarter loss of US$190 million, compared to a profit of US$101 a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter was at US$580 million, compared to US$598 million the year before. The loss was caused by MSN heavily investing in search, trying to catch up to market leader Google.

Overall, Microsoft reported a 24% decrease in Q4 profits, but a 16% revenue increase for the entire company. These less than stellar figures were sweetened by a generous share buy-back program that was announced at the same time as the results, and by Microsoft's bullish growth outlook.

The Verdict?

Yahoo! has definitely fallen out of favor with investors who are worried the company has missed the boat in the community space and is falling further behind Google in the search game - just like MSN certainly doesn't seem to be gaining any search ground just yet. This impression was supported by the fact that Yahoo! announced delays in launching their new advertising software, which was supposed to help the company improve the monetization of searches.

While some of Google's underlying trends don't look too exciting either, investors are simply in awe of Google's paid search juggernaut that seems to be generating limitless growth in advertising revenue.

Yahoo! Looks to Dominate Mobile with New Motorola Deal

Yahoo! and Motorola have just announced a new deal that will see Yahoo! Go pre-installed on millions of Motorola handsets from early 2007. The new deal means that Yahoo! has now secured what could be market dominating deals with the world's top two mobile phone manufacturers.

Earlier this year, Yahoo and Nokia secured a deal that would see Yahoo!'s mobile services pre-installed on many of Nokia's new 60 series and "N" class multimedia phones.

Now that the ink has dried on the new multi-year Motorola deal, Yahoo! execs are surely excited by the dominant position the company holds on the mobile service market. Search nemesis Google must be ruing the new deal as Nokia and Motorola are clearly the dominant mobile handset players. With both tied into deals, Google will be forced seek out 2nd tier manufacturers, or tackle the mobile market from a different angle.

Search engines have been clearly focusing on the mobile market as more and more people now have internet access via their cell phones. Consumers want services on demand, and their cell phones are the modern day PCs and laptops.

Yahoo! Go is a software system designed to make Yahoo! services as easy to use on mobile phones and TVs as they are on computers. The software includes Yahoo! email, search and address book all in one place.

By having Yahoo!'s mobile software pre-installed on handsets, market leadership is almost a certainty in the short term. Just remember back to the impact of Internet Explorer being included with all windows based PC's.

Well, with the top mobile handset manufacturers tied to Yahoo!, the next roll of the dice will be by Google or MSN surely. As the end of 2006 draws closer, mobile search is sure to get a shake up, and at this stage Yahoo! are sitting pretty.

Google Strips Search for the Visually Challenged

Google Labs has released a new site that aims to make their search offering more useable for the visually challenged. Many visually challenged people use screen readers to navigate through the internet. Google's new Accessible Search service is formatted to offer the search results best suited for people relying on screen readers.

The site filters out results that have too much distracting/irrelevant content so that not only the search results are easy to read, but the suggested websites are also "screen reader" friendly.

Google's Accessible search is one of the services spawned from Google's commitment to R&D. Google employees are encouraged to spend time on personal projects which they deem interesting or relevant. Dr Raman, the research scientist in charge of the new product, developed the Accessible Search service as his personal research project.

Dr Raman's reasons for developing the new service were really a case of "necessity being the mother of invention". The research scientist is in fact blind. In reflection, he realized the project was actually much more difficult than he first expected.

The Accessible Search service further sorts search results based on the page's layout simplicity, the quality of design employed and the organization and labeling of information on each page. Considering the plethora of busy confusing websites out there, building an algorithm that sifts through the clutter would have been quite a challenge.

It's quite a remarkable service. Try doing a search on Google's Accessible Search service and compare it to the tradition Google search results for the same keyword or phrase.

I wonder whether Accessible search is another way for us to further cut through the clutter that Google's normal search engine results generate. Maybe it's a handy tool whether youâ€™re visually challenged or not.

Thursday, July 20

Online Ad Spend Leads Advertising Growth

Online advertising spend in the U.S is growing faster than any other advertising medium, increasing by 46.4 percent in the first quarter of 2006 from the same time last year.

This tremendous growth rate of Internet advertising (which only refers to display based advertising) as reported by Nielsen Media Research, sits far ahead of any other media, with Spanish-Language TV securing the second highest ad spend growth of 14.3 percent, followed by Outdoor which rose by 12.8 percent. The 11.1 percent increase of Network TV advertising was largely aided by the 2006 Winter Olympics (close to $1.1 billion was spent during the games).

Source: Nielsen Monitor-Plus, Internet data provided by Nielsen//NetRatings, July 2006
Notes:
- Estimated online spending reflects display based advertising only. Reporting does not take into account the following advertising vehicles: paid search, service fees, performance-based campaigns, sponsorships, barters, partnership placements, advertorials, promotions, and desktop applications.
-Syndicated TV was omitted due to changes in tracking.
-Newspaper reflects display ads only.
-Coupon reflects CPG products only.

Overall advertising spend in the U.S. rose 5.6 percent from Q1 2005, with the top 10 companies spending $4.6 billion - an 11.4 percent increase compared to the same time last year. The 10 largest categories also increased by 6.1 percent, spending $10.5 billion on advertising.

Tuesday, July 18

Google Is Updating It's Page Rank - Are You Up or Down?

In the search engine world, the Page Rank (PR) measure is closely watched by all those chasing the elusive top positions in Google's search results. PR is one of the critical factors that Google uses to determine its ranking results.

The theory behind PR is quite simple. The more relevant back links a website has, the higher its PR, and accordingly the more importance Google places on its content meaning higher rankings.

Remember, PR and back links alone don't determine the rankings. There is a myriad of other factors that the search engine algorithms use to decide where your website will appear in the SERPs, but they have been recognized as having a significant impact.

So explanations aside, it would appear that Google, the search titan, is updating its dreaded Page Rank and has also exported the latest Back Link counts. Google tends to do these updates/exports periodically . Whether this is a quality control measure (ie avoids their measures being influenced by websites buying bulk links from non relevant sources) or not, it often means that Google's measures remain unchanged for months, even though your site back links might be increasing (or decreasing) within their datacenters.

We like many website owners watch these variables on-going. So when a movement occurs, it encourages us to evaluate our optimization strategy progress.

On discovering the PR update, we did a quick check on our Google Back Link count and discovered that both had been updated simultaneously (not always the case). While we retained our Page Rank and even saw some nice improvements on individual pages, we did notice a drop in our exported back link count.

Does a drop in back link count mean that alarm bells should be ringing? Not necessarily. It does suggest that you should continue to work on your linking strategy as a continued drop in quality backlinks could eventually mean a decline in Page Rank. But remember that you should always look at not only the quantity, but also the quality of your backlinks.

The drop we experienced may be caused by many factors such as websites that link to us having closed, or webmasters changing their sites and links (all variables beyond our control). It has got us motivated to start supplementing the losses with new relevant links to ensure we maintain and improve our Page Rank. At the end of the day, unless your PR is 10, you have scope for improvement.

Now we have blogged extensively on effective link building techniques, so if you would like to kick start your campaign, visit this previous post.

How to Get Good Incoming Links

I would be interested to know how Google's update is impacting your website's Page Rank and published Back Link count. Let us know by leaving a comment!

Yahoo! Officially Unveils the New Homepage Design

After months of testing and tweaking, Yahoo!, the world's largest search portal, has finally unveiled its new homepage design aimed at making it more relevant to its users and international markets.

Initial testing on the new homepage began back in February this year, with the goals to make the homepage smarter, faster and more personalized. While initial previews were available to beta testers back in May, the official release happened early Monday morning.

So has all the effort paid off?

Well the jury is out on the new design. After taking the new site for a spin this morning, there are some obvious improvements and enhancements that do improve the user experience, but I am still overwhelmed by the busyness of the homepage.

The new design offers users all the intuitive control one would expect with the current technologies available (Ajax and DHTML etc.). This makes the usability of the page significantly better than its predecessor, with roll-over tabs and user controlled views making the interface much faster to navigate around (no more reloading of pages to get to different sections).

An obvious scope requirement for the redesign was a focus on "local" content and search. This is apparent across several elements of the page with the page itself easily set to specific geographic regions around the world.

There are many other "nice to have" customizable features littered through the new design, such as page layout controls and color settings, but the real value will be achieved when users have real control over the content such as news and RSS feed controls.

The new direction for the homepage also poses questions as to the long term value of Yahoo!'s "MyYahoo" homepages. As the homepage becomes more user-controlled, the need for a separate MyYahoo homepage is diminished.

So with all the improvements what are the downsides? Well there aren't too many, but as I mentioned earlier, the clutter on the homepage is very distracting. Striking a balance between providing enough information and too much information is sometimes quite difficult. I would like to see user controls to remove page elements that are not relevant.

Interestingly, I was talking to a colleague of mine recently, and she remarked on how cultural backgrounds affect our preferences for layout and formatting. While Western cultures tend to go for clean uncluttered presentation, Eastern/Asian cultures are actually drawn to busier formats. So potentially Yahoo! is trying place more attention on these rapidly growing markets...

Either way, if you haven't had a chance to check out the new homepage, it's worth taking it for a test drive...it really is a good redesign all told.

Monday, July 17

Lights! Camera! Action! - Yahoo!'s New Ads Created by Users Like You

The changing facing of the internet is being driven by user generated content and the technologies that facilitate this new form of free expression. Yahoo!, the world's largest search portal, is embracing the new consumer generated phenomenon to develop their next advertising campaign.

Yahoo! has put the call out to it's users to submit their ideas for the search icons next range of advertising. Whether you're a budding film maker, someone who thinks they have a flair for ad creative, or just plain crazy with a handicam, you have the chance of shoot the next range of Yahoo!'s video ads.

User-generated ads are not a totally new concept, with Chevrolet testing the idea for the release of a new SUV model recently. While their effort generated an overwhelming response, it also highlighted the pitfalls of letting the public have their say. A legion of anti-SUV activists used the opportunity as a chance to voice their concerns and led to the eventual removal of the website.

Yahoo! bosses are obviously confident in the satisfaction of their users.

"Any advertiser or business that isn't maximizing the power of what users have to say is crazy...The brand belongs to the customer. Who better to express what we're all about than them?" said Company Vice President, Allen Olivo.

While Yahoo! suggests that anything goes with the videos, entrants must adhere to the company's usage rules and not contravene any copyright laws in the video production.

To get the ball rolling, students from four arts schools were asked to generate videos scripted by OgilivyOne, Yahoo!'s advertising agency. To see some of the first videos visit video.yahoo.com.

So are you the next Steven Spielberg or just an annoyed customer waiting for you chance to screen your opinions? Either way, if youâ€™ve got a video camera, then start shooting. Time will tell whether Yahoo!'s embrace of user generated content will create ground breaking advertising or just a spate of funny home videos...

Friday, July 14

New York Times Offers Personalized Press

Personalized homepages are all the rage at the moment, and with the proliferation of the internet and Web 2.0 innovations, traditional media icons are being forced to catch up or fade away.

The NY Times is the latest traditional media organization to venture out in the world of personalized homepages. "Mytimes.com" as it is appropriately named, employs some of the great user controlled benefits of Web 2.0 and RSS technology.

At this stage, Mytimes.com has only been released in a beta form, with a current limit set to 5000 users. It offers readers the option to select which parts of the news source and selected 3rd party blogs and websites they wish to receive via RSS feed. The restrictions on sources could be the undoing of the new site as most competitors allow complete user control.

Considering the NY Times is already competing with other online news sites like, Yahoo! Google and MSN not to mention the other RSS feed aggregators, which give users access to unlimited sources, it could be a case of them missing the boat. Well at least the NY Times faithful will be able to access their favorite news source from their own personalized page.

Until the service is open for mass consumption, it is hard to determine whether Mytimes.com will actually be a good move for the New York press icon, but at least their trying to catch up with the technology revolution. As for the rest of the traditional newspapers out there, it makes you wonder where they'll be in a couple of years...

Thursday, July 13

MySpace Climbs to the Top

MySpace.com holds the number one position as the most popular U.S. site for the first time, surpassing Yahoo! and Google sites for week ending July 8.

According to data released by Hitwise, the extremely popular social networking site accounted for 4.46 percent of all website visits, pushing out current market share leaders Yahoo! Mail (4.42 percent), Yahoo!'s homepage (4.25 percent) and Google (3.89 percent).

Market Share of Website Visits - Week Ending July 8, 2006
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Website	Market Share (%)
1. MySpace	4.46
2. Yahoo! Mail	4.42
3. Yahoo! (homepage)	4.25
4. Google	3.89
5. MySpace Mail	2.85
6. MSN Hotmail	2.39
7. MSN	1.92
8. eBay	1.59
9. Yahoo! Search	1.36