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.
Google’s Webmaster Tools team have again been busy working on new enhancements to the Webmaster Center – with 2 new additions to the Lab.
Today, the team announced the release of the following into the Webmaster Labs area:
The Webmaster Tools Lab is where the team release their improvements and functionality for public testing before releasing them properly into the Webmaster…
Last year, Google released a new search function which allows users to sift through global public data.
Now before any of you get concerned with Privacy – this isn’t your personal stats and online data – it’s more generic public information. Here’s an excerpt from the release post last year.
“We just launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. So for…
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…

According to posts on webpronews and search engine land, Google has expanded testing for their new search results page, which we first discussed back in November last year. As we mentioned last year, the changes include a search options panel on the left hand side which helps navigate between different types of searches.
Search Engine Land has a great image which shows the differences between the original test…

As the economic downturn continues to impact marketing budgets, more small businesses have turned to alternative marketing methods such as embracing social media.
According to results from the small business success index, levels of social media adoption increased from 12 percent to 24 percent over the past 12 months.
The research identified that around one in five small businesses owners are using social media in their business, which…

Google obviously understands the importance of it’s Local search as it continues to push out Local Search enhancements on an almost weekly basis.
This week, Google unveiled its newest Local enhancement – the “Nearby” filter.
Google’s Search Options became a permanent feature of the SERPs back in late 2009. The search options give users more control over their search results, allowing them to filter based on search verticals,…

The reports have emerged that Google has finally done a deal with Facebook which will see Facebook content emerging in Google’s real time search.
After securing a deal with Twitter in December last year (and MySpace also) which saw Google take the lead in the real time search space, this latest initiative will help cement its position forefront.
At this stage, reports suggest that Google will only be…

I use Yahoo! Site Explorer almost every day to check basic link stats for both ineedhits.com and our clients. It is an extremely useful tool which can provide a lot of useful data about the inbound links to any site on the web.
There are a number of reasons the tool is one of my favorites:

The major search stats are out for January 2010 and it further shows how the steady decline of Yahoo! is being picked up as growth by other search engines such as Bing.
During January 2010, Bing searches increased 0.6 points to claim 11.3 percent of overall searches, while Yahoo! continues to fade, dropping 0.3 points to 17 percent.
Here’s the full range of stats from comScore:
When you compare…