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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, March 31

New Chinese Law could be Hurdle in Microhoo Deal

A new antimonopoly law in China could be the make or break for the proposed purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft.

The New York Times has reported that the Chinese government is activating this new legislation from August 1 2008 and gives "Chinese regulators authority to examine foreign businesses investing in Chinese companies' operations".

The reason this new law could hurt the Microhoo deal is because Yahoo! invested $1 billion in China's largest e-commerce company, Alibaba.com back in 2005.

Chinese regulators will have the authority to review the Microhoo deal to assess the impact it could have on Alibaba.com.

Nathan G. Bush, an antitrust law specialist with O'Melveny & Myers in Beijing, said the law represented the rise of China "as another regulatory capital contending for influence with Brussels and Washington." He also added that "multinational corporations will need to develop strategies for all the markets they operate in... and China is a big market."

The Chinese government has not yet made it clear what their position is on Microhoo, but it certainly will be interesting to see what effect this has on the Microsoft-Yahoo deal and any other future mergers by global companies.

Google Finally Introduces Video Ads in Search Results

The wait is finally over- Google now has video ads in their search engine result pages.

Just last month, Google's vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer gave us the first hint that video ads might be on the way and advised that the approach would be "delicate" which it certainly is. Video ads are only appearing on a very few selected queries as plus box results accompanying normal text ads.

An example is shown below for the BlackBerry.

When you click on the "Watch demonstration" link the actual video appears.

So just how do video ads work? Google clarified to Search Engine Land last month, that "advertisers pay on a CPC basis where any click counts. Meaning, if a user clicks on the URL link, that counts as a click or if a user clicks to play the video (via the plus box) that also counts as a click. An advertiser only pays for one click."

While the new video ads will not be immediately obvious to all searchers, the "watch demonstration" link will certainly lead to plenty of curious clicks by users and this could really be the start of something new in search engine marketing scene.

Google Crackdown on AdSense Publishers who 'Blend' Ads

A recent post on the Google AdSense blog indicates a Google crackdown on AdSense publishers who 'blend' the Google Ads into their own content. This has been regarded as one of the most effective ways for publishers to increase their click through rate, but has been placed on the naughty list by Google.

In extreme cases, some AdSense publishers have managed to blend their Ad units into page content, so that it's almost impossible to distinguish from actual content.

Common ways of doing this have been making AdSense look like navigation, or placing ad units amongst other groups of links. Google issued the following rules in their blog post.

Rule 1: Ads shouldn't be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.

This includes using ads under a title such as "Today's Hot Deals" as shown below:

Rule 2: Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.

This refers to disguising ads amongst other content or links on a page. Google recommends users make the colors of the ad unit different to surrounding text. Below is a screenshot of a site breaking this rule:

Google's reasoning for these guidelines is that the above techniques may cause readers to lose trust in your website (and the Google advertising platform) and not return.

If these guidelines are going to effect you, share your thoughts below.

Labels: Google AdSense

YouTube Finally Launches Video Statistics

In a move that's been a long time coming, YouTube have finally released a video analytics tool for all users of the site. The statistics tool lets users see the number of views their video has received and where in the world these views come from for a given date range. The look and feel of the stats package should be very similar to anyone currently using Google Analytics.

While YouTube is a fantastic platform for hosting and distributing online video, I've always felt it lacked the kind of reporting that you would get from hosting the video yourself. The new analytics tool should help to solve some of these issues.

While the analytics tool is only new, the stats themselves go back quite a while, for one of my earlier videos the stats go back to the 1st of April 2007.

I've taken some screenshots below:

Views by Country:

Popularity:

These basic stats should help online business and marketers understand where their videos are popular and how their number of views changes over time. While I would love to see some more in-depth stats like average drop off points and abandonment rates, I think this is a great start for YouTube.

If you want to see stats for your video, try clicking on the "About this Video" button under "My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos." As always you can let us know what you think by leaving a blog comment below!

Labels: Youtube

Sunday, March 30

Google Adds DIY Robots.txt creator to Webmaster Tools

Google has added yet another handy feature to the Google Webmaster Tools. Now website owners can easily create Robots.txt files and control which web pages search engines see and "don't" see on their sites.

For those of you unfamiliar with Robots.txt files, Wikipedia explains them:

A robots.txt file on a website will function as a request that specified robots ignore specified files or directories in their search. This might be, for example, out of a preference for privacy from search engine results, or the belief that the content of the selected directories might be misleading or irrelevant to the categorization of the site as a whole, or out of a desire that an application only operate on certain data.

Now if you're not overly confident creating your robots.txt files from scratch, you can simply create one using your Google Webmaster Tools.

As the Google release post suggests:

"It's designed to give you an easy and interactive way to build a robots.txt file. It can be as simple as entering the files and directories you don't want crawled by any robots."

The tool allows users to either create broad exclusion rules which apply to all robots and crawlers or specific rules for particular robots. See the screenshots below.

Once you've created the robots.txt file using the tool, all you have to do is upload it to the top level directory (root) of your website and voila - you're all done.

As the release post highlights, not all robots obey the conventions of the Robots.txt protocol, but rest assured most of the major search engines do, which is where most of your website crawling will come from.

Google's Reach Is Much Lower Than its Search Share

A new report out by Nielsen Online shared a common tale that Google again dominated the share of searches in Feb 2008. But a little reverse engineering of the stats highlights an important fact for online marketers.

According to the report, Google carried 4.5 billion searches in Feb 2008, 58.7% of the market in the United States. It was trailed by Yahoo! and MSN (as usual) with 17.6% and 11.2% respectively.

Missing out on podium positions were AOL, Ask.com, My Web Search, Comcast, AT&T, Dogpile and Next tag, with the chart below highlighting their respective share of the US market.

The report also detailed the average searches per user for each search engine, which prompted me to do some alternate number crunching, in terms of "search reach". I had no doubts that Google would carry the greatest reach, but I wasn't as convinced that its domination would be as significant.

Alas, using the figures for the top 10 as my guide, the reality is that Google holds a narrower lead on the competition in terms of "reach".

According to my rough calculations, Google only carries a reach of approx 42%, with Yahoo! holding about 21% of the market. The chart below highlights my workings on the reach calculations.

Now, before the "who cares" alarms go off, this is important for online marketers. It highlights the value of diversity in online marketing campaigns. When you look at the numbers in terms of reach, search engines such as Yahoo! (21%) or even AOL (9%) and ask.com (7%) do provide some genuine exposure.

Now search marketing, as with any marketing, is about getting "bang for buck". So by no means am I suggesting that you should divest your Google marketing budget. The moral of this tale is ensuring you don't miss valuable exposure opportunities by being single-minded in your strategy.

Tuesday, March 25

Google AdWords Demographic Targeting Now Live

On Friday, the official Google AdWords blog announced a new feature: demographic bidding. Basically, demographic bidding allows advertisers to target ads to users of a particular age group, gender or a combination of those factors.

Advertisers can use demographic bidding on contextual or placement targeted campaigns. The feature is restricted to certain sites in the content network such as MySpace and YouTube because Google uses the demographic data available on these sites to target your campaign.

For example, say you sold men's hats and want your ads to be seen by 18-30 year old men. You could use the demographic bidding feature to eliminate wasting ad impressions on 18-30 year old females, or decide to raise your bids and increase the frequency with which they are shown to your core group of 18-30 year old men.

Overall I think demographic bidding should help to extract some more value out of the content network for advertisers who may have overlooked it in the past. If you're targeting a very specific niche it could also help to improve your conversion rates or reduce your cost per sale.

If you're a serious online business, you should already be using Google AdWords to drive new sales. If your not, but want to get started, try our Easy Search Advertising service which can have your online advertisement up and running in only 48 hours.

Google to Offer Free Wi-Fi in the U.S.?

Yesterday, Google made a proposal to the Federal Communications Commission to free up unused TV broadcast channels known as "white space". The plan? Utilize this bandwidth for a high speed wireless internet network that can propagate long distances and through obstacles. Google engineers have called the offering "Wi-Fi on Steroids".

The white space Google is talking about is part of the TV spectrum that offers extra room for channels 2 to 51. When digital TV becomes mandated in the U.S. (after Feb 2009) this extra space will be no longer needed and Google is suggesting that it be used to build a hi speed wireless network.

In the FCC submission, Google outlines some processes and tests to avoid interference on the frequencies and offers free tech support for people using their Wi-Fi. This submission coincides well with Google mobile android handsets which are due out later this year.

While the plan for free wireless internet would surely increase Google usage in the U.S., there are some other implications that need to be considered. For example, Marketing Pilgrim points out that as an ISP, Google would control a huge amount of personal information which could be integrated to influence search results.

Business owners should keep their eyes on this one, as free wireless internet for all = the need for an advanced internet marketing strategy.

Google Officially Owns an SEO Firm: What's Next?

Now that the European Commission has finally approved Google's DoubleClick acquisition, what will Google do? In case you were unaware, Google's lengthy $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, means they now own the SEO firm, Performics.

So now Google owns a firm that can help businesses improve their ranking on Google. Confusing? Yes. Conflict of interest? You bet. When Google went public they made it clear they had no intention of operating a paid inclusion or ranking solution, by issuing the following statements in their IPO:

"We do not accept money for search result ranking or inclusion" and
"Our search results will be objective and we will not accept payment for inclusion"

However the Performics acquisition now changes this and means in a way, they do accept payment for ranking and/or inclusion. While they still donâ€™t accept direct inclusion into Google, some of Performics services are designed to improve your search engine ranking, and they do offer paid inclusion services with Yahoo!.

Whichever way you look at it, Google offering SEO services is just messy. It raises a whole bunch of questions without immediate answers and many are calling for Google to divest themselves from the company. Popular SEO blogger Danny Sullivan asked Google for a comment on the issue and received the following reply:

"We intend to spend the next several months assessing all of DoubleClick's products and services including those offered by Performics. In the near term, we intend to operate Performics as a stand-alone business unit consistent with its past practices. Upon the completion of our integration planning with respect to Performics, we will be in a better position to announce our future plans for this business."

So I guess we will hear an answer from Google in the next couple of months about their plans for the company, lets hope they do the right thing.

Monday, March 24

Google "Search in Search" Sparks Competitive Concerns

We recently reported on Google's new search in search functionality where Google offers users the ability to search a site within its SERPs (search engine results page).

Search in search is aimed at helping searchers get to their desired information more directly from Google's results. The concept sounds great in theory, with searchers being able to filter through a site's content direct from the results page.

Well it's great until it presents competitor sponsored listings when displaying the internal search results from a particular site.

SeoSmarty highlighted the competitive issue that the new search in search functionality presents. They used the example of a search for Virgin Holidays to Florida.

Conducting the search "virgin holidays" in Google presents a "search in search" listing for Virgin Holidays as the top organic listing and only one sponsored listing for Virgin on the right hand side, as the term is protected by trademark.

Now if the user then types in "Florida March" using the "search in search" box, Google displays a myriad of listings from the Virgin Holidays site, but also displays PPC ads for competitors related to the search.

image source: seosmarty

The competitive edge that Virgin had through the trademark protection on the first search is bypassed on the search in search listings. Competitors can now get invaluable exposure when users search within a particular site.

Now some antagonists will say, the "Florida March" search isn't protected by trademark, so it's relevant cross promo from a searchers point of view. But imagine you were using Google's site search for your website and they presented sponsored listings alongside the results from your site. Surely you wouldn't want competitors ads displayed within your results.

Google will need to rethink their monetization of search in search, as the current experience will have many marketers up in arms. If they continue to present competitive ads alongside "search in search" listings, site owners will prefer to have the search feature removed and bank on users clicking through to their sites to search further.

Thanks to Rishil at SeoSmarty for uncovering and sharing the potential issues "search in search" presents to marketers.

UPDATE: it seems that the ads are only visible to some viewers, so either Google is testing not displaying the ads, or it depends where you conduct the search.

Yahoo! Turns to Traditional Media for Market Penetration

Yahoo! seem hell bent on regaining market share whether acquisition discussions come to fruition or not, and they're turning to traditional media to make their mark.

Listeners in the San Francisco bay area have been hearing new Yahoo! adverts across the radio airwaves. Elinor Mills shared some ad content through cnet News Blog.

One of the ads starts with: "Search engines like Google get you lost in all the links, but not Yahoo search," before highlighting the new-ish search suggestions offered by Yahoo! The ads also see a renewed use of the Yahoo! Yodel that was key to their marketing years ago.

Raj Gossain detailed the reasoning behind the ad campaign by stating:

"The rationale is we feel like we've built a better mouse trap and, quite frankly, we wanted to remind users that there really is a choice in search engines...We've got a better, simpler, easier-to-use mouse trap."

Yahoo! has also been heavily promoting their search offerings through Australian television, via their relationship with the Seven Television network. Viewers are greeted with a range of post program snippets directing them to the Yahoo!7 portal for additional TV show extras. And again, the Yahoo! Yodel is making a resurgence.

Time will tell whether this use of traditional media marketing will help them recover much of their lost audience, but from a Yahoo! advertisers point of view, at least their testing new ways to drive higher traffic.

Small Business Marketing Advice from Search Engine Strategies New York

The Annual Search Engine Strategies - New York conference has recently drawn to a close, and one of the panels was focused on providing some Search and Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners.

The panel, made up of Stoney DeGeyter, Matt McGee and Jennifer Laycock, detailed some great advice for the prudent small business operator in today's online marketing landscape.

Stoney DeGeyter, a leading proponent of "destination search engine marketing", encouraged website owners to drive visitors to pages within their sites that best matched their searches. It seems obvious, but many small business operators fall into the trap of sending everyone to the homepage, where visitors get lost or distracted - neither of which are good for conversion.

He also highlighted the importance of addressing purchasers at every point in the buying process. Whether they're researching, making final product comparisons or ready to buy, your site should be designed to take them through to the purchase irrespective of their place in the process.

Covering your bases through cross sells was also raised a key strategy. By presenting related products, it can help business owners maintain the attention of a buyer that isn't necessarily sold on the product they initially visit - potentially saving the sale.

Jennifer Laycock, Editor in Chief at Search Engine Guide, then discussed the importance of "you" in marketing small businesses, recommending business owner involvement in online community to gain buyer attention. The social aspect to small business marketing helps owners to overcome bypass budget constraints to reach their marketplace.

Matt McGee, SEO manager at Marchex, reinforced the value of communities, encouraging business owners to explore unconventional approaches offered by the social web. He highlighted the value of participation in networks such as Yahoo! Answers and lists offered through Google and Yahoo! groups to build reputation, but warned against abuse through spamming.

In the highly competitive online space, the underlying message behind the three panelists recommendations are -

Understand your market and tailor your marketing to stand out from the competition
Participate in the growing convergent media environment to build reputation and connect with customers.

Thanks to David Utter from WebProNews who seems to be the only person to have shared the insights from the Small Business Blitz session at the conference.

Tuesday, March 18

Microsoft & Yahoo! Meet to Discuss Future

Yahoo! may have begun to accept the probability of a Microsoft merger by holding talks with the company late last week. As reported by the Wall Street Journal and C-Net, the companies met last Monday to discuss Microsoft's takeover offer for the company.

The meeting was a breakthrough in discussions between the two companies who have been in a stalemate following Yahoo's rejection of the offer last month. Microsoft's $44.6 billion dollar offer represented a 62% premium on Yahoo! shares at the time but was rejected by Yahoo! because the offer "substantially undervalued the company".

According to the Wall Street Journal, the meeting was designed to allow Microsoft to present their vision for the company and Yahoo! members simply listened. No bankers attended the meeting and it is not clear whether the CEO's of each company were present.

Either way, the meeting represents a positive step in the relationship between the two companies. It's also a smart move by Yahoo, who need to fulfill their investor obligations to seriously consider the offer. Only time will tell the outcome here but the signs look good for Microsoft.

Labels: Microsoft, Yahoo

Monday, March 17

Uncovered: The Google Quality Raters Handbook

It's not often that documents from inside Google are leaked on the internet, and when they do webmasters tend to pay a lot of attention. The Google Quality Raters Guidelines recently surfaced on the web giving an insight into what Google considers SPAM and how they evaluate the quality of search results.

The handbook gives details on how Google rates the accuracy of their own search algorithm and what pages are classified as SPAM. According to the handbook, Google classifies webspam under the following categories:

PPC Pages - Web pages setup for the purpose of collecting PPC revenue without providing any or much of their own content.
Parked Domains - Sites that are setup on expired or parked domains to exploit pre existing backlinks.
Thin Affiliates - A page that exists to deliver a visitor to a page on another domain with a different owner.
Hidden Text and Hidden Links - Page that include hidden text designed to trick search engine robots.
JavaScript Redirects - Web pages that use javascript to redirect spiders and users to different versions of the same page.
Keyword stuffing - Web pages that load with excessive keywords to draw search robots to their pages.
100% frame - Pages that use frames to deliver different looking content to search spiders and users.
Sneaky redirects - Web pages that present different content to the user and robot by redirecting visitors through a series of pages.

This guide gives detailed descriptions on all of the above methods and even includes examples of sites currently spamming search results. Some of the examples given even mention quality guidelines for online merchants eg:

a "view your shopping cart" link that stays on the same site and updates when you add items to it,
a return policy with a physical address,
a shipping charge calculator,
a "wish list" link, or a link to postpone purchase of an item until later,
a way to track FedEx orders,
a user forum,
the ability to register or login,
a gift registry, or
an invitation to become an affiliate of that site

Reading the guide gives an insight into the inner workings of a Google search and I thoroughly recommend all webmasters read it.