Yahoo has rejected Microsofts offer to take over the search pioneer. According to the official Yahoo press release the offered $31 a share massively undervalues the organization, cash flow and earnings potential and they believe that other alternatives can be used in order to keep shareholders happy and retain control over their brand.

With Yahoo currently in the process of letting about 1000 people go from the company, those at the top owul need to cut more jobs if this deal went through. Another thing to consider is that Microsoft and Silicon Valley companies do not play well together. Seen as a mega corporation that stifles creativity and absorbs competition, Microsofts pockets can handle a sizeable counteroffer , possiblt over $40 a share that may force the hand of stockholders.

Yahoo’s alternatives are along the lines of partnerships with Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp, Time Warner’s AOL and even their main competition Google. While a partnership with Google may sidestep anti trust laws by acting as a search/ad/ content deal, don’t expect Microsoft to hold back with throwing some legal red flags to prevent that deal. Given all the possibilities and speculations at this point one thing is certain, Microsoft is definitely Yahoo’s last resort, and one that isn’t leaving the scene anytime soon.

With search engines placing more and more weight on relevant content the push to create keyword rich copy is on many site owners minds. Or at least it should be. Web 2.0 and social media sites have allowed an unprecedented platform to communicate, network and share ideas across the Internet. By creating a blog for your website you not only are helping your search marketing efforts by using key phrases, but you are also putting yourself out as a knowledgeable professional in your field.

A potential customer (and search engine spider) is always more inclined to go with an information rich page on the topic of interest. One must keep in mind however that people are the ones that buy and therefore need to be engaged by your content. The advantage of a blog comes into play here by allowing you to put up fresh content and get visitor feedback.

Certain web 2.0 applications like squidoo work well as a “one sheet” listing information and links to your company for free with a high search ranking. Others such as myspace and facebook aren’t required for a lot of businesses and those that do create profiles and not embrace the social network seriously and put in the time will be left with an outdated page that no one wants to be friends with. On the other hand monitoring the page regularly can help with brand exposure.

Moral of the story is keep the fresh content flowing. Search engines and people will be attracted to you and your services and may eventually see you as a resource for information. At the least you will be keeping yourself up to date and informed about your own industry.

From the Google Webmaster Central Blog, Goole has introduced “video sitemaps” which can be added to the Sitemap Protocol. The blog gives an example of the video-specific code, as does the Google Help Center.

I would think that third party contributors will be offering Video Sitemap Generators very soon.

Really important heads up here, everybody:

In an article on TheStreet.com about Google’s heavily anticipated 3rd quarter earnings report which will be released today, October 18th, a few sentences halfway through the piece really jolted me out of my pre-caffeinated haze:

“Advertisers will now have to pay the highest amount they bid for an ad. Previously, advertisers would get a refund for the amount between what it took to win an ad auction and their bid.

The move is widely expected to boost the amount Google makes on search.”

Not Good from an advertiser or agency POV.  This sucks for advertisers and SEM firms unless, maybe, they own enough Google stock to offset the added PPC costs.

My hunch is that it is going to require a lot of report running and meticulous bid tweaking to protect our clients’ PPC budgets from the cost increases that this policy change is going to drive.

I’ll do some more research and add my findings here later.

Another well reported article from the NY Times of interest to search engine marketers, this time about Google and cellphones and a 21st century version of the Great Game, with the prize in this case being access to cellphone screens around the world instead of the oil-rich hinterlands of Central Asia. The plot is thickened by a cast of software developers, open source practitioners and of course megacorps around the globe, and accelerated by untold billions in potential ad revenue.

Right off the bat, I’d like declare myself a skeptic on the notion that cellphone search advertising is going mass market anytime soon.

Smart phones do provide a great if unproven opportunity for paid search to find a new foothold within a potentially massive consumer market, allowing advertisers to connect to a certain demographic - which is great if and pretty much only if you’re selling something to the kind of people that are buying smart phones!

But I digress. This article gives us some insight into Google’s manuvering - either acknowledged or behind the scenes - to find a way to penetrate this (smart) cellphone market, perhaps by promoting open source operating systems, programming standards, and APIs or libraries of code that provide developers with this or that Google-driven function. [Read more →]

From the NYTimes on Wednesday, here’s an interesting article on Yahoo’s latest gambit to compete with Googzilla: Yahoo Upgrades Online Search Engine

Yahoo has been working hard to whip up some buzz about the recent “enhancements” to its core search engine, and the article above provides a good, unhyped overview of the non-technical details about the “new Yahoo” as well as a brief sketch of the historic background to this latest chapter of the Search Wars (hint: they ended 3 years ago).

It seems to me that one key audience that is routinely left out of this discussion of Yahoo’s fading popularity and subsequent efforts to resurrect itself is the SEM industry. As far as I’m concerned, they badly botched their attempt to launch a new Google-free Yahoo search in 2004 not merely by putting a sub-standard product in the marketplace, but more specifically by trying to merge the Inktomi model of pay-for-indexing (Inktomi was one of their big acquisitions) with the Yahoo directory (the core of old Yahoo) in with their new and rather weak organic search engine, while simultaneously going full guns with their PPC products, which also lagged behind Google’s at the time. But it was that pay-for-organic-indexing nonsense that really annoyed a lot of search marketers and I don’t think they’ve ever completely restored their reputation within this community. Well, that and the fact that their market share has consistently dwindled in the interim may have had just a little something to with their decline in SEM land.

As for the “New Yahoo - 150% More Yahooriffic”, I haven’t really explored all these whiz-bang enhancements that are supposedly going to get Yahoo Search back in the Game, but I do like the automatic search term suggestion drop down and I like the idea that Yahoo can somehow leverage Flickr to make their image search better than those other guys’s image search . If anyone has delved further into the details of new UI improvements or other changes at Yahoo (including Yahoo local, which has been getting tweaked significantly over the past 6 months) , please share. Color me skeptical but open-minded.

We are in the process of writing SEO code specifications for East, does anyone have suggestions or want to add anything to the spec before we send it to Rick? Currently it calls for WC3 compliant CSS/XHTML table-less coding that separates presentation (formatting) from behavior (scripting) and content. By using external CSS sheets for presentation, XHTML for framework and external scripting files we significantly increase the code to text ratio of a website, allowing the content to rise to the top so to speak. Additionally we stipulated that the CSS file to include formatting for all comment elements including H1, H2, H3, and that CSS be used to achieve roll over effects instead of javascript and for all scripting to be external rather than inline.I’ve had a great deal of success in the past coding websites in this manner and it’s made a significant difference in each site that I’ve coded. If anyone would like to see a copy before we submit it please let me know and I’ll email it and please let me know if you have any suggestions or additions.

I’m trying to find an answer to the question of why a site has suddenly lost its high rankings. I called Google AdWords, (866-246-6453) but the rep said there is a seperate “Organic Results Team” of which I would need to contact via a web form he was going to email me. Well, I never got the email. So, I logged into my Google Accounts to try to find contact info for Google. There’s lots of help pages, but nothing solid. I found a post in the Webmaster Discussion Group, but no comments answers to the post. So, I’ve posted one myself..entitled “Site Lost Ranking”:..http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/topics.

 I spent way too much time trying to get Google Help….

Search engines send out spiders to index pages. Spiders do consider a time it takes to load a page as one of the coding elements it will consider for SEO. One of the best ways to improve faster load times is to use CSS (cascading style sheets) by removing some of the code from the text page, the text to code ratio will improve.

Another way, is to remove the spaces between the code on the page. This will also help a page load faster.

Google has released a non-API embed feature for Google Maps which is a much easier way to put an interactive Google Map into a webpage or email.

I just did one for Riteway Delivery Solutions:

http://ritewaydeliverysolutions.com/map-directions-ritewaydeliverysolutions.html

Go to Google Maps and type in the physical address, city, state, and zipcode (i.e.: 2580 N. Powerline Road, Suite 605, Pompano Bch, FL 33069) into the search bar. When the map comes up, click on “Link to this page” on the top right hand corner. You will be given HTML code for either email or webpage. Copy the html code into the body of the webpage. That’s it. You also have an option to change the size of the map.

The process took less than five minutes to create….much less than the “long division” method.