The search engine had previously had a massive 60 individual privacy policies, for each of its multimedia services. On 1st March, all of these policies will be combined into one shared policy that will cover Google services such as Google Search, Gmail, YouTube and Google+.

The main changes will apply to users with Google accounts, and it is claimed that the united privacy policy will enable Google to provide its users with more relevant search results, and will allow advertisers to find their customers more easily.

Google has a number of services, including everything from email, video uploading and social networking, and of course the search engine where it all began.

Alma Whitten, director of privacy, product and engineering for Google, said: “we’re rolling out a new main privacy policy that covers the majority of our products and explains what information we collect, and how we use it in a more readable way.”

Google has been heavily criticised in the past for the way in which it handles and shares user data. In its previous attempt at a social networking platform, Buzz, Google had unwittingly revealed each user’s most emailed contacts to other account holders.

The Federal Trade Commission has since come to an agreement with Google that will prevent it from unlawfully using personal information and sharing a user’s data without their permission.

Using the paid-for tweeting service to promote hashtags to the top of the trending lists, McDonalds created the #MeetTheFarmers hashtag last week in order to post wholesome stories about the fresh produce supplied by farmers to the famous Golden Arches.

However, a couple of tweets used the more general #McDStories hashtag, and it was this that was seized upon by Twitter users wanting to air their grievances about the chain.

Customers tweeted about their negative experiences eating at McDonalds, with endless tales of chipped teeth and cases of food poisoning, while one user claimed to have found a fingernail in a Big Mac burger.

Other users took to the #McDStories hashtag to share their bad McDonalds experiences, until the chain decided to pull the promoted hashtag as it had veered so drastically off-message they felt it was unrecoverable.

McDonalds social media director Rick Wion said of the failed campaign: “Within an hour, we saw that it wasn’t going as planned. It was negative enough that we set about a change of course.”

The original #MeetTheFarmers hashtag has managed to escape the McDonalds backlash, and is still being used on Twitter.

A survey by think tank Pew Internet has found that around 29 per cent of US adults are now owners of devices such as the Apple iPad tablet or Amazon Kindle e-reader.

This is a dramatic jump from just 18 per cent before Christmas, with the festive season, and the release of two new colour screen e-readers from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, fuelling the increase in units sold.

The number of adults who own a tablet rose from 10 per cent to 19 per cent, as did the number of adults who own an e-reader. There is also a considerable overlap wherein some adults will no doubt own both devices.

Pew Internet surveyed over a thousand adults across America, and found that the cheaper retail prices of some of the new devices have been a major factor in improved sales. For example, the new Amazon Kindle Fire currently sells for under $200.

Speaking about the findings, Pew Internet said: “As the holiday gift-giving season approached, the marketplace for both devices dramatically shifted. In the tablet world, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets.

“In the e-book reader world, some versions of the Kindle and Nook and other readers fell well below $100.”

Set up in 2007 by co-founders Andy Redfern and Andy Donaldson, Hit Search now boasts a 16 strong team and regularly ranks within the top SEO agencies in the UK.

Andy Redfern, director of Hit Search acknowledged the role of Liverpool Innovation Park in its rapid growth. He said: “As a start up, we were looking for somewhere to offer us flexibility in terms of contract length and also an environment which compliments what we do.

“Being at the Innovation Park meant we were surrounded by a number of other forward-thinking companies in the digital sector who we could work with and share valuable leads and contacts.”

Dr Mark Tock, Innovation Manager at Liverpool Innovation Park, said: “The Park’s flexible offering and proactive approach in fostering the relationships of its occupants is what builds successful business.

“Andy and the team at Hit Search were able to complete negotiations, undertake significant customisation of the premises and move into the new premises within four weeks. This is just one example where we support our clients from the early stages to enable hassle-free growth so they can get on with running their business.”

Hit Search has taken residency in the Park’s Maxwell House Business Centre which offers immediate access to networking facilities as well as having its own boardroom and breakout space for customers and clients.

Liverpool Innovation Park, which includes Wavertree Technology Park, forms a key component of Merseyside’s knowledge economy.

Liverpool Innovation Park is operated by Space North West, a joint venture between Ashtenne Industrial Fund and the Homes and Communities Agency. Liverpool Innovation Park was part funded by the European Regional Development Agency (ERDF).

If you want more users to find your site, and to inhabit it, give them more reason too. Don’t just provide a plethora of text based SEO bait for the search engines themselves. Instead, broaden your entire range of services to give the users more and more reasons to use your service. Introduce video, podcasts, news, blogs, social content and more, combining all of these various means to give the human users every reason to choose your site over a competitor. It doesn’t matter if your primary aim is to sell t-shirts; create a t-shirt podcast, viral videos, t-shirt messageboards, competitions and more. Not only does this provide you with more SEO bait to draw in potential buyers, it also gives you more SEO opportunities to rank within the search results. Thanks to Google’s blended search results, high ranking images, videos, news stories and more can appear in the first page of general search results and not just niche results (such as all news results, all video results or all image results).

Furthermore, from a perfectly relevant, non SEO point of view, once you have your target audience landing on your site, you want them staying there for as long as possible and not bouncing to another site straight away. You’ll succeed in this by giving them as much reason to stay as possible.

I’m referring specifically to Google’s personalised search results, which can be a great idea for your average internet user, but rather misleading when tracking SEO. Google’s personalised search results use additional criteria to rank search results, which go beyond the basic factors to produce a list of results that the search engine believes will be of greater benefit to you individually. It uses complex algorithms which take into account the sort of sites you visit and with what frequency to tailor results to your needs, but the problem this present to search optimisation is that when you review your work you are not seeing the same results as the average user. Since the site you’re working on may appear higher in your personalised results you may not be doing as well in the rankings hunt as you think you are.

In order to combat this and to receive the same general search results as everybody else, simply log out of Google whilst carrying out your Google search or append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar. This way you can see the same results as the general public and get a better idea of how your SEO strategies are being implemented.

These complicated algorithms take the search words punched in by the user and scour the internet for these keywords or key phrases, then order their returns on the basis of relevance to these words, authenticity of the information, popularity of the site and a number of other criteria used to decide the ranking of each page.

For this reason it is crucial to your search engine optimisation campaign to accompany any video material with plenty of descriptive, keyword rich text because it is this body of content that the search engines rely on to ascertain the relevance of the video to the search criteria. It could be that the search engine user could benefit greatly from your video, and might even be looking for that video in particular but without keyword inclusive headings, descriptions and accompanying information the search engines cannot locate the information.

You cannot underestimate the value of relevant text content upon every page of your site if you are trying to improve search engine optimisation, because whilst it might not be as aesthetically pleasing to the user once they are on your page it is integral to the majority of users finding the site in the first place, by engineering the page to appear prominently within search results.