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

YOS: Rewiring Yahoo From The Inside Out

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!!!

Microsoft: Forget It On Paid Search Partnership, Google & Yahoo

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.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.
SEORoundTable - Daily Search Forum Recap: March 31, 2008

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

I cannot believe the press this morning, but it’s official Microsoft has made a hostile takeover bid for Yahoo! All of us in the SEM industry have heard this ‘rumor’ before, now it’s for real!

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.

You can promote your business online through many ways but paid advertising and search engine optimization are the most popular. Online paid advertising is done through PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns by paying various web owners and bloggers to display your link on their websites. Whenever people surf through those sites, your link automatically appears on the page. It increases the traffic to your website and you get the advantage of increased response ration.

SEO is based on natural search ranking determined by search engines. SEO means targeting the right keywords and relevant terms. It doesn’t target every word on your page. Hence, appropriate use of keywords in the web content is important. Your web page is ranked according to the kind of information you provide on your website. There are many techniques that can improve your ranking.

Both of the above kinds of advertisement techniques have their own pros and cons. Today, most of the professionals are opting for search engine optimization because it has certain advantages over the paid advertising.

SEO advertisement technique remains effective for longer period than online paid advertising. If it is done properly at the very start, it is difficult to change your search engine ranking. Only big changes in search engines algorithms can affect your ranking. Naturally appearing links are trusted more by most of the net users that is why majority of the net users never clicks the sponsored or PPC links.

SEO is much cheaper than paid advertising because in online paid advertising you pay for every click whether you get revenue or not. While in case of SEO, if you get higher ranking due to the quality content of your page, you have to pay nothing for clicks. SEO maintains your website. Good SEO enhances the existing conversion rate significantly. By updating your web page content regularly or by introducing some changes in the content or formatting, you can attract right kind of people towards your products or services.

Although SEO is a trusted way of online advertisement and marketing but it has some shortcomings also. Though you don’t pay anything regularly for SEO but you need the services of a SEO professional on regular basis. However to reduce the recurring charges of SEO professional, you can hire some company or individual on contract basis. In most of the cases, SEO marketing takes long time to deliver the expected results. Till, then you can’t simply wait. To cover this shortcoming, it is better to generate some traffic through paid search engine advertising for the time being.