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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 28

Google Finally Gives Wikipedia a Run for It's Money!

It was December last year when we first heard about Google Knol, touted as the "Wiki Killer". Well, Google has finally put the finishing touches to Knol and opened it to the public.

Don't expect Knol to be the "Wiki Killer" though as it is actually quite different to Wikipedia, most notably though with what Google calls "moderated collaboration".

This means that users/readers can only suggest edits to the articles in Knol. It is then up to the article's author to accept or reject those suggested modifications. Unlike Wikipedia, the author has full control over the article, which seems quite logical considering their name is attached to the article.

Another major difference between Wikipedia and Google Knol is the fact that Google plans to actually make money from Knol by giving authors the option to include AdSense ads in their articles. Google is effectively offering a monetary incentive to create good content. So, in theory, the best articles will get the most attention, and in turn the most revenue.

So if you know a lot about a particular subject and would like to earn a little extra cash on the side, then why not check out Google Knol.

Microsoft Gives Up on Yahoo!, Now Stalking Facebook!

It seems that the chase for the elusive Yahoo! was just too tiring for Microsoft so they have given up and set their sights on a new prey- Facebook!

According to the New York Times, Microsoft is set for a new deal with Facebook in which Microsoft will provide search and paid listings to the social networking site.

This news was strengthened even further when Satya Nadella, Microsoft SVP Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group, told financial analysts "We will be providing an API to Facebook where they will create a rich search experience, including a Web search for the Facebook users. And that's something that they will launch in the fall, working with us, and it'll carry both our Web results as well as our paid search advertising."

Microsoft has had a limited search and advertising deal with Facebook for almost two years, but this new deal would be a bit different - it would include integrating Microsoft Live search as the site's search engine, and would include results from the web (including Microsoft's paid listings) at large.

Given that Facebook has been struggling to make money from its current advertising structure, it is hoped that this deal will change the tide and give Microsoft a gain over Yahoo! & Google. Jefferies & Co analyst Youssef H. Squali explains that "it's just really hard to monetize a social network, and I would argue that Google is in a better position to do it. They have thrown more resources against it and they have been at it for the last eight years." So is Microsoft trying to flog a dead horse? I guess only time will tell!

Google Not So Super, Quite "Unsatisfactory" Actually!

Well that's how the Better Business Bureau (BBB) sees Google anyway.

The BBB recently listed Google as having an "unsatisfactory record" when it came to complaints handling.

The BBB issues reliability reports on all businesses in the US based on the number of complaints the company receives and the rating is based on how many of these complaints are resolved. The BBB has given Google an unsatisfactory rating "due to failure to respond to one or more complaints and or two or more otherwise unresolved complaints."

The bureau processed a total of only 332 complaints about Google in the last 3 years and Google has resolved most of these complaints.

I wonder if Google is worried about this rating at all, considering that 332 complaints over a 3 year period seems quite few for one of the world's biggest companies.

I'm sure Google gets countless complaints on a daily basis. So to have one or two which are not yet resolved is pretty good going I think.

Let us know your thoughts on Google's complaint handling record. Have you had a negative experience with them?

Google Updates PageRank and Drops Old Penalties

Last Friday, Matt Cutts (Google's head of webspam) announced that Google was updating its PageRank (toolbar) over the weekend, and more importantly, some of the older penalties were being dropped.

As with all PageRank updates, site owners are reporting movements up and down as the full update takes effect. Some of the key PageRank measuring tools (e.g. SEOquake) are still not reporting consistent figures.

While PageRank isn't a definitive guide to Google's ranking algorithm, it is still viewed as one of the key indicators.

The toolbar update, which tends to occur every 3 to 4 months, is only Google sharing a snapshot of the dynamic PageRank which it uses in its algorithms. As matt points out:

"It's more accurate to think of it {PageRank] as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar."

Of more interest in the announcement post by Matt Cutts, was the removal of some old penalties. While Matt doesn't disclose exactly which penalties have been dropped (obviously), some of you might see some unexpected improvements in your results.

Last year saw many sites hit with penalties due to certain link acquisition strategies and a lack of new link acquisition. If you were affected by these, chances are you might get some reprieve from the new update.

Matt has provided some good feedback to commenter's questions and remarks (over 230 comments at the time of writing this post), so pop over to his post if you want to digest the entire conversation.

If you've seen any movements in your PageRank, share your tales with other readers via our comments below.

The Pressure Rises - Google's Index Reaches 1 Trillion Pages

Reports out of the Googleplex are purporting that Google's search database has hit a significant mark...it's finally tipped over the 1 trillion URL (web pages/files) mark.

Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj, two Google software engineers from the web search infrastructure team, made the unexpected discovery. In an awe filled statement on the Google blog, the engineers shared:

"We've known it for a long time: the web is big...Our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs on the web at once!"

Google doesn't index "every" page and file on the web (to maintain relevance and avoid duplicate content), so the actual web is significantly larger. However, Google's database does represent the biggest index of all the search engines.

As the team point out: "...we're proud to have the most comprehensive index of any search engine, and our goal always has been to index all the world's data."

While impressive stats about Google's index and the size of the web are great to marvel at, it should also set off some alarm bells for website owners.

As Google's index continues to grow at unprecedented levels (remember it was only 1 billion URLs in 2000), it also becomes harder to stand out in the "sea of information".

It's a simple equation. More web pages mean more search engine competition, which increases the pressure on site owners relying on the web to drive their business.

So a burgeoning Google index, reinforces the need for you to have a strong ongoing SEO and search marketing campaign in place. Google's index milestone is no reason for celebration for site owners - it just raises the pressure!

Friday, July 25

Overcoming The Obstacles - Small Business Search Engine Marketing Adoption

Why is it that small businesses resign themselves to hardship and struggle by ignoring simple marketing techniques that are tried and tested winners.

Several posts recently have stirred up my thinking on the matter.

What initially sparked my train of thought and research was a new report out by JupiterResearch. The report predicts search advertising should grow to $20.9 million by 2013, but suggests "an inability to tap into the small local US advertiser market" would be the primary reason for growth slowing down.

So why are Small to Medium Businesses ignoring a winning marketing strategy?

Then I stumbled onto an interesting blog post by Frank Reed from Frank Thinking titled "Small and Medium Business (SMB) Search Marketing - What's The Deal?"

As we're both in the Search Engine Marketing provision game, you'd be forgiven for thinking we have a vested interest in the subject - but the reality is, we both know it works - as proven by the successes of our customers and growth in the industry.

Some of the points and questions Frank raised reinforced some internal discussions we've had recently as to why SME adoption of search marketing is slower than expected. Education, Fear, Confusion and Time could be the obstacles.

While a significant proportion of our customers are quite tech savvy, there's a larger proportion that aren't. It's these business owners that want SEM explained in business terms which address the above obstacles (not tech talk).

Mike Moran from Search Engine Guide, added to the discussion siting the following theories on why SME Search Marketing adoption is slow:

The Internet Is Still too Hard: Many business owners still view technology as difficult and are yet to embrace it as a key means of enhancing their business. While this is changing with a new breed of tech savvy small business owners emerging, there's still a significant tech usability gap with existing small business owners.

Internet Marketing is scary: The unknown in the cyber world has many business owners unsure of the benefits and weary of the downsides. While they are comfortable with traditional media (yellow pages, newspapers etc) and the risks and pitfalls - the internet is a whole other matter. Without understanding the inner workings, they're scared of messing it up (cost and impact).

Inertia: Small business owners are time poor, which leaves them unable to learn enough about new marketing strategies to wander far from their existing methods, whether they work or otherwise.

Are any of these obstacles to you embracing Search Engine Marketing?
Chances are, if you're reading this post - they're not, or you are trying to remove them as obstacles.

One of the keys to overcoming such obstacles is better education (in simple business terms) by SEM providers. So over the coming weeks, we are going to run a dedicated series of blog posts that will explain Search Engine Marketing for Small Business. (hang on - maybe that should be "Small Business Marketing using Search Engines")

What are your thoughts on the SEM adoption by small business operators. If you've avoided Search Marketing so far, share with our other readers why? Is it fear, time, confusion or lack of education? Or perhaps it's some other reason...

Tuesday, July 22

New Microsoft Ads - Offering More Revenue than Google?

Microsoft has released a beta version of their new contextual advertising product, to compete directly against Google AdSense and Yahoo's Publisher Network. AdSense is the clear market leader for one clear reason - Google pays the highest fees to publishers.

The actual details are light on as the product is still in private beta. However it appears the main feature will be the ability to display Microsoft ads next to Google or other third party ads.

The challenge in any contextual advertising (at least for advertisers) is getting decent click through rates and generating a positive ROI. Anyone who has accidentally left on the content network when setting up a Google Adwords account, will tell you the quality of the traffic from the content network versus the search network are like chalk and cheese.

Microsoft may be able to win the mind share of publishers by offering higher revenue splits than Google, which may very well be the tactic behind their bigger search strategy.

By getting publishers on board, the number of page views will increase which will naturally attract advertisers and drive ad inventory. As the inventory increases, so should the competition and click prices will increase. It just depends on how deep Microsoft is willing to go to fund this initiative - their pockets are very deep after all.

Then there is still the quality problem for Microsoft to solve!

Google School Lesson No. 2: Technologies behind Google Ranking

It's back to school again with the second lesson in Google ranking: Technologies behind Google ranking.

As we mentioned last week, Amit from Google had promised to continue feeding us with more information about Google ranking and he hasn't let us down. This time he has explained more about the technology behind the Google ranking system.

Here are some of the main points to note:

The core technology in the Google ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR).
To understand pages Google has crawl and indexing system technology.
Google tries to associate concepts to pages, even if those concepts aren't clear from the language on the page.
Google makes a distinction between "important and less important words in the page."
Google also looks at the "freshness of the information on the page."
Google has a spelling suggestion system and an advanced synonyms system so it knows exactly what your search query means.
Google uses localization systems (geo-location) to give "the best locally relevant results served globally".
Google's latest advancement in search technology is a translation system called Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), which "allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible."

If you would like to read the article in full, then click here.

Google understands that search habits are constantly changing. In the last decade search has moved from "give me what I said to give me what I want" and it is great to see that Google is on the front foot in making search for us as easy as possible- guess that's why they are number one!

Google Holds 77.4% Dominance in US, But Japan A Whole Other Story!

A new report just released by Efficient Frontier has shown that Google continues in its dominance over Yahoo! and MSN with Google now holding 77.4% of the search ad market.

For every new dollar spent on search ads in 2008 over 2007, Google received $1.10; while Yahoo lost $0.09 and Microsoft lost $0.01.

Although Google's dominance is very strong in the US, this isn't the case across all countries worldwide. In particular, Google is behind in China, South Korea, Russia and Japan. Figures from the report show Google having barely 50% of the Japanese market, with the other half belonging to Yahoo.

So, for the US market, this is great news for Google. However, this dominance could come back to bite them as they are currently trying to win US government support for a plan to have Yahoo! carry some of Google's search ads. With stats like this we will no doubt hear noise from Microsoft in terms of why a Google-Yahoo! deal would be bad for competition.

Is Microsoft Onto a Winner with CashBack?

It seems that the CashBack offer that Microsoft started back in June might be a triumph if the latest statistics from Comscore are anything to go by.

For those of you who don't know about Microsoft Live CashBack, it is a new search advertising strategy from Microsoft which aims to pay searchers who use the search engine to find and buy products from participating retailers. It shifts search advertising from cost-per-click (CPC) to cost-per-action (CPA) and gives a lot of the revenue back to users.

Comscore have released statistics showing a 15% increase in search volume in June for Microsoft compared to May 2008.

Microsoft now holds 9.2% of the US search market, still a long way behind Google which decreased by .3% in June to commands 61.5% of the market. However, this should be seen as good news for Microsoft, any initiative that takes away market share from Google (albeit very small) is a positive and I think they might be onto a winner with CashBack.

Friday, July 18

The Ranking Turmoil of Google's SERP Update Continues

Google updated their SERPs in early June, and the ranking and indexing pain of the update is still being felt by website owners as changes continue to happen.

Navneet Kaushal, a regular contributor to SearchNewz, pointed out the "aftershocks" of the Google update are still being reported in the forums, with some considerable fluctuations being noticed - months after the update.

The biggest issue for site owners seems to be consistency in terms of ranking and accordingly SEO traffic. One of the site owners shared a timeline of events for his SEO at the WebmasterWorld Forum:

June 3, Google organic drops by 30% vs. normal
June 4, Google organic traffic returns to normal
June 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 17, Google organic returns to normal
June 19 , Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
June 27, Google organic returns to normal
July 9, Google organic again drops by 30% vs. normal
July 11, Google organic returns to normal
July 12, Google organic again drops, but this time by 80% of normal
July 13, Google organic returns to normal

As you can see, the SERPs seem to be all over the place, and he's not alone in experiencing this trend. The update has left site owners in dismay, as summed up by this post.

"the last couple of months have seen changes in the Google SERPs that defy explanation from any previous basis."

While rampant speculation about the ranking impact of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and using Google Sitemaps has been bandied around in the forums, it is yet to be confirmed and proven whether any of these elements play a new role in Google's ranking algo.

As site owners continue to debate the cause and remedy for the Google ranking fluctations, one forum summed it up best:

"Getting and maintaining good rankings is really about watching over the health of your website, indefinitely. There's often no such thing as "set it and forget it", no magic formula that is always guaranteed to work. Of course that's business as a whole, anyway."

So if you're feeling the aftermath of the June Google SERP update - time to review your website and see whether you're SEO strategies are still relevant.

Microsoft Seeks AOL to Tempt Yahoo! Merger

Microsoft seems resigned to the fact that Microhoo (the potential Microsoft-Yahoo! merger) is not going to be an easy deal, and accordingly are moving on with Plan B.

The Wall Street Journal reported that AOL and Microsoft executives were in discussions over a possible merger between the two companies.

The idea of Microsoft merging with AOL has been circulating for a couple of months, but given Yahoo!'s shareholder meeting is due for August 1st - the software giant could be using the potential of an AOL deal to sweeten the merger prospects for Yahoo!

Let's put the AOL merger into perspective.

AOL represented about 11% of US online revenue in 2007,
It's valued at over US$8.3 billion.
comScore ranked AOL's Platform-A as the top advertiser network in terms of unique visitors
AOL sites set new traffic records this year with over 56.5 million uniques per month.

If Microsoft and AOL were to merge, that would create a formidable online force, and represent some serious competition for Yahoo! beyond just search marketing.

Shareholders "might" see it as better for Yahoo! to merge with Microsoft, than face more competition and see their holdings diminish in value.

The only thing that would throw a spanner in the works (other than Merger Price Tags that Microsoft aren't willing to pay) is approval of such a three way merger. The competition watchdogs will be on to this like a hawk to prey!

Stay tuned, as August should see this merger triangle really heat up.

Tuesday, July 15

DIY Search Engine with Yahoo! "BOSS"

Is this a sign that Yahoo! is fighting back against Microsoft takeover bids? Last week Yahoo launched the DIY "Build your Own Search Service"(BOSS), which is a series of APIs that allow anyone to create their own search engines.

The totally unrestricted program uses the Yahoo search infrastructure and technology to allow users to do things such as:

1. Present search results in any format they wish
2. Re-rank search results
3. Mash up search results with other data
4. Unlimited access to data sources such as web, news and image search

Whilst BOSS is a great innovation for Yahoo! and the search community, do not think that Yahoo! is doing it totally out of the goodness of their heart. BOSS does require the display of ads, so provides another revenue source for Yahoo!, provided the developer community responds.

There is no reason why the developer community wouldn't take to this product. The big draw card is the unlimited queries, which is different to the Google Custom Search Engine, which does impose API limits.

I, for one, am looking forward to the various mash ups that developers are going to dream up. Some will be useful, others frivolous whilst some will be just cool. Perhaps some enterprising developer will build a BOSS for the iPhone?

Monday, July 14

Yahoo! Conversion Tips: Muster, Monitor and Maintain!

We have seen a lot of search engine marketing tips from Google lately; however Yahoo! has jumped on the band wagon also by providing us 3 tips to improve your paid search advertising conversion through the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.

Yahoo! suggests 3 main tips to improve your conversion: Optimize, Navigate & Track.

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Your landing page is the first web page a searcher will see after clicking your ad, so make it shine.

Use a "deep link" to a specific product on your site.
Offer multiple ways for your customers to contact you.
Make your online shopping cart safe and easy to use.
Maintain good server availability and remove any broken links from you site.

Navigation

Make sure that your website is easy to navigate by putting yourself in the eyes of the visitor.

Create an obvious pathway to your products or services.
Maximum of two clicks for the searcher to find what they are looking for from landing page.
If you're after a sale, move any non-commercial content "below the fold".

Track Your Results

Tracking the performance of your online marketing will help you analyze your results and make adjustments, if needed.

Track conversion data with Yahoo! conversion-only analytics tool.
Know which keywords drive the most conversions and allocate the budget to these.

What do you think of these tips from Yahoo!? Are there any others that you would add to the mix? If so, let us know in the comments section below.

Will Google Lively be the New Home of Virtual Business?

Have you jumped on board the virtual world juggernaut?