If Microsofts walkaway from the Yahoo deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have destroyed Microsofts chance to get there.

Continue reading “Leaving Las Yahoo: Microsofts $5 Billion Mistake?” on Search Engine Land Now

Yahoo’s relatively new CTO Ari Balogh expanded upon Yahoo’s “open” initiatives in a keynote speech to the Web2.0 conference yesterday.

Check it out!!!

There is a great thread over on SEOmoz by Matthew Inman about how some Googlers consider any of his future attempted linkbaits and widgetbaits to be off topic spam, based on his aggressive misuse of widgets in the past.

Thanks for the article Aaron, it’s gooood.

Any definitive agreement between Yahoo! and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands. This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo! We will assess closely all of our options. Our proposal remains the only alternative put forward that offers Yahoo! shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

Out of all the companies Google has acquired, the purchase that led to what we are going to talk about today was of a small little company called Android Inc. This company wasn’t even around two years before Google swept them up. Of course, this only added fuel to the fire that Google was going to get into the cell phone market. This is what I am here today to talk about — Google’s Android.

Check out SEOChat’s article about Google Android here

The announcement of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo! didn’t come as a total surprise, these two courtesans have danced around before. A merger of these two have been speculated over for the past 18 months, ever since the companies discussed collaborating in late 2006.

Make no mistake; this deal will close. The $31 per share offer represents a 62% premium over Yahoo!’s market close Thursday.

How can the Yahoo! Board say no? We can’t find many reasons (especially with T.Semel no longer pulling the purse strings). Either way, they should not combine the names; as you can see above neither is very appealing “Yah-soft” or “Micro-hoo” (both sound like childrens candy names to me)

See Latest News Coverage:
Microsoft, Yahoo! In Possible Partnership Talks
A Messy Marriage
Microsoft/Yahoo Merger to Take on Google?
5 reasons to worry about a Microsoft/Yahoo merger
Justice Department likely to review a Microsoft-Yahoo merger

UPDATE:
BlogNewsChannel posted an amazing writeup on the proposed merger see below:

* About 30% of the search engine marketplace. Microsoft has wanted a position to challenge Google for a long time, and this would give them a big enough search engine to hopefully make some noise. However, Microsoft would have to reverse Yahoo’s decline in order to take advantage of that market share.
* Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail. Yahoo claims 255 million email account, Microsoft 280 million. Reports put Gmail at around 51 million accounts. If properly leveraged, Microsoft’s 500 million-plus accounts could represent an insurmountable number one.
* Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. As of 2006, Microsoft had 61% market share worldwide, good for #1, and Yahoo had between 27% and 37%. Yahoo’s number were the same as AOL Instant Messengers (there is more than 100% because users often use more than one client). Google Talk is a non-factor practically abandoned project, and Microsoft one-two punch could bury this market for good.
* Advertising revenue. Microsoft pulled in $1.5 billion from its online services division in 2007, most of it in ad dollars, losing $510 million. Yahoo made $7 billion in 2007, turned a profit of $700 million, on $6.088 billion in advertising revenue. It isn’t quite Google’s $16 billion, but Yahoo is a profitable online advertising company, and gives Microsoft a strong, larger base to grow from. It will take seven year for Yahoo to make enough revenue to cover the acquisition cost.

Hello SEO Experts,

I know most of the SEO techniques, but one important factor as we all know is pagerank, and to have a higher pagerank we should get inBound links to our site.
My question is, can we make our site appear in top Search Engine Results, without having any inBound links? even for challenging keywords?

Everything related to SEO seems very logical to me, but the most important thing is to have inBound links to your site. It’s really time consuming, to send emails to web masters and ask them for a link. I know a good website will result people to link to us without we ask for, but what if my site is a personal site for example, and it is a normal site, I don’t think people will link to me just like that in my case ! Does that mean I will never be in first page? (Note that I am now in page 10, but I’d like to be in page 1, for a challenging keyword).

By the way, I have submitted my site to some free directories, but I am not sure if this will help my pagerank (currently I am 0/10 and i published my website 4 months ago)

Please advice and let me know how should I go on from now, because concerning the content of my site, I assume it is * VERY WELL * optimized for Search Engines, the only thing remaining is the PageRank issue.

Best regards,
Wassim

Forum discussion continues at HighRankings Forum.
Is SEO Possible Without Inbound Links?

Before developing the content, research your keywords thoroughly. If you select wrong keywords for your content then even effective writing produce no results. So, you should have clear idea about the appropriate keywords. Though many online services like WordTracker and Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help you but it is better if you develop your own keywords keeping in mind the exact purpose of content. Try to insert long tailed keywords in the titles because most of the people search the content using long tailed keywords.

Your page titles also appear on the search engine results as highlighted links. It is better to select a separate unique title for every page of your website. Just to put your company name on the top of every page serves no purpose. Titles of the pages should be able to hint about the content of particular pages.

The content of each and every page should be different, informative and latest.Relevant and compelling but different content of pages helps you on many fronts. This practice makes your website information-rich and your website link-worthy. It also increases overall keyword density in your content without suffocating the content with keywords. Your description also appears on the search engine results. Many people click the link only after going through the description. Use meta tags in your description.

Always avoid the big gap between the title of the page and your content. To keep such people intact with your site, it is better to keep your important stuff at the top. Don’t waste space by having needless JavaScript and tools to make your site more attractive. These measures ultimately serve no professional purpose.

Search engine friendly URLs alo help you to improve the ranking of your site. Hence instead of using dynamically generated URLs, always generate search engine friendly URLs. Use your heading tags to highlight main stuff of the content. Some search engines also pay attention to the content expressed with bullet. You should present your content as anchor text.

Facilities like sitemap and navigation system also attract the readers. Web crawlers’ don’t miss the links provided in the sitemap. It is also good if you submit your website to online directories. This will also improve your internet rank.