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.
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…
To say that Google is a busy company is probably an understatement. Almost every week we hear of either a ranking update, a new Google project or webmaster tool.
2009 was certainly a busy year for Google; it left Yahoo! & Microsoft behind in terms of innovation (besides the new Bing search engine). Can you list all the new features and releases from Google last year?
Thankfully, you…
Google is the first to tell us that links from relevant and important sites are always a great way to get more traffic and increase your ranking in the search engines. But what about links from new platforms such as Twitter and Facebook?
Popular Googler (and recently clean shaven) Matt Cutts shared his thoughts in a recent video below.
Google treats links the same irrespective of where they…
Duplicate content is a topic that has been getting quite a bit of exposure recently. Google released some tips on how to avoid duplicate content issues, as well as a new tool to help you out also.
Google are at it again with a new initiative to help webmasters who have duplicate content across different domains.
Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, John Mueller explains more:
For some sites, there are legitimate reasons…
As the end of 2009 draws to a close, everyone starts sharing their predictions for the year ahead. So to get the ball rolling, Google’s Matt Cutts has weighed in with his predictions for search over the next 3 years.
In true Matt Cutt’s style, he has used video to provide his insights to a viewer’s question. You can watch Matt’s response below.
To summarize Matt’s predictions for the…

You would think that listing all the factors that Google uses to determine your ranking would be a near impossible task, right? Well, apparently not. Today we have your first sneak peek at the list of the almost 200 search engine ranking factors used by Google.
How did this list get started? Well, apparently Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200…
Content scraping is a fairly common practice whereby other websites will copy some text, links or images from your site to use on another domain. If you’re writing content for the web, there’s a good chance this may have happened to you, but does this practice actually impact your Google ranking?
While many webmasters fear that content scraping may result in duplicate content penalties, the good news…

There has been a bit of buzz lately from the SEM world with rumors that Google Caffeine has been rolled into the main Google search results.
For those of you who may be living under a rock, Google announced the new Caffeine sandbox project not long after the Bing/Yahoo! partnership formed (talk about stealing their thunder!). Caffeine is basically a completely new version of Google’s search engine.
Here…
The latest video in our SEMVideo series focuses on how small businesses can effectively optimize their website when they don’t have the cash to get it done professionally.
SEO can be very time consuming for small business owners, not to mention often expensive if you outsource to professional SEO companies. Google understands that many small business owners and webmaster don’t have the time or funds, which is…

Here’s another video for you in our SEMVideo series…
This week we take a look at how you can ensure that Google reaches those deeper pages on your website.
Your site might have hundreds of pages, so you need to give Google’s spider the best chance of finding and crawling these pages.
In the video, Mr Google, Matt Cutts dishes out a couple of action items you can do…