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 advise.

Touted as “its most significant homepage redesign in over a decade”, Microsoft has begun rolling out its new homepage to select users.
Microsoft says the redesign includes more than 30 updates that are based on 70,000 pieces of customer feedback. These new features include:

We’ve not heard a lot of news lately from Yahoo! so when its CEO Carol Bartz speaks it sparks some attention.
When Bartz spoke to AdAge recently she took a swipe at the advertising industry as a whole.
“For an industry that’s based on creativity and inspiring people, I don’t know why it’s so afraid. I don’t think it should be afraid to just try some crazy new…

Last week I explained how to Monitor, Listen & Respond to social media comments as part of my overview of the Media140 conference. This week, we will look at how social media sites can be used as an effective crisis management tool.
The rise of social media sites has given customers a new avenue to talk about your company and in turn a new way for you to…

Just when you thought Google couldn’t possibly find a new avenue for their search engine, along comes Google TV.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Google is testing a new television programming search service in conjunction with Dish Network.
Details on the project are a little sketchy so far as Google has not officially announced anything. However we do know that the service is currently in a limited…
Location-based advertising is not a new concept. Companies such as AdMob have being doing it for while now, but it seem that Google had the idea first.
News has surfaced that Google filed a US patent nearly 7 years ago for “determining and/or using location information in an ad system.”
Venturebeat discovered the patent as it was finally granted last week. Here is an extract from the patent:
“The usefulness,…

Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, FriendFeed, Digg, YouTube, MySpace… with new social media sites popping up almost daily, it can seem quite daunting as to how your business can use them effectively.
This is where the highly anticipated Media140 conference comes into play. The Perth leg of the event was held last week and I was lucky enough to score myself a ticket.
For those readers who are unaware…
This seems like a valid question considering the lack of activity from Yahoo! lately in search, while Google & Bing continue to innovate.
Well, to answer the question, Yahoo! still is very much committed to search as indicated at its recent SearchSpeak conference.
The event was basically a press conference allowing Yahoo!’s Search Products SVP Shashi Seth to dispel the “misconception” that Yahoo! was no longer investing in search.…

After launching Buzz last week, Google have continued on the social track by now acquiring social search service Aardvark.
The deal, rumoured to be worth around $50 million, could see Google use the social search engine as an answer to, well, Yahoo! Answers. Through IM, Twitter and e-mail, Aardvark lets you ask full-text questions and then takes your social connections and attempts to identify the best person within…
At the end of last year, Google’s Matt Cutts hinted that speed could become a factor that Google looks at for ranking search results.
This was big news in the SEM world and got many webmasters worrying that their website didn’t load quickly enough. (We even devoted a whole post to how to fix your site.)
Despite the fact that Google never said that page speed would become any more…

If Google gets its way, 2010 is to be the year of display ads.
According to Business Week, Eric Schmidt’s prediction about display advertising back in July last year could well come true.
The Google CEO hinted that display advertising could be the next of Google’s businesses to generate $1 billion in sales. Now analysts believe that this wish is likely to come true.
Analysts including Doug Anumth from…