Yahoo and Microsoft at it Again?

After publicly claiming that they were through dealing with Yahoo! and had pulled all deals off the table, Microsoft would neither confirm nor deny that they had started talking to them again. This is tantamount to admitting that they are, since the ‘no comment’ stance is different than the ‘we’re through, period’ stance.

In the convoluted mess that this whole saga has become, I suppose nothing should surprise us. So eager was Yahoo! to ward off stockholder revolts and stay independent of Microsoft that they signed on with Google to use Google’s search advertising platform. This is stunning for two reasons:

The likelihood of this passing regulatory scrutiny is low (unless they know something that I don’t), since together Yahoo! and Google combined would control over 80% of the online advertising market.
Yahoo is basically admitting that their $1.63 billion purchase of Overture in 2003 (and all the subsequent R&D dollars that have gone into the ad-serving platform since then) were all for naught.
Item #2 is particularly interesting, since Overture, and subsequently Yahoo, had a huge head start in the paid search space. Adwords Select, the first pay-per-click model from Google, launched in 2002, while GoTo (the former name of Overture) launched four years earlier. What a message for Yahoo! to send to the world – we just aren’t as bright as those Google guys, and we’ve given up trying to be.

I wouldn’t want to be in Jerry Yang’s shoes right now…

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Keywords For SEO

When I take on a new site, I like to place a lot of the keyword myself into the different areas such as Title Tags, META Keyword Tags (although not used by search engines so much these days), META Description, ALT Tags, H1 text and also keywords in inner page names.

Once place in which I am not so happy about placing keywords is in the actual content of the page. I like to ask the client to help me when creating text for the web pages. I always tell a client that they are going to be better at writing the copy for their own site as they will understand their industry a lot better than myself. I normally suggest that keywords are placed 5 times in the content of a page and one of these occurrences is in the H1 text, which leaves the client to try and find 4 places where they have to place each keyword. It can be hard work and may not read as well as they would like, and if so, I normally suggest adding more text to the site to try and fit the keywords in.

I would recommend having at least 300 words in a web page before you add the keywords to it. Search engines love text, but they hate non-unique text, so make sure you don't cut and paste - this is the worst thing you can do.

One final point to mention when adding keywords is to try and group your keywords together as closely as possible, so if you have the keywords 'Keywords for SEO' to try and place into the document as many times as possible, it would be better to group these together rather than using a sentence like this.... 'If you want to get you sites keywords higher by using natural search engine listing techniques (SEO) then this is for you' A better way to get the keywords in would be 'Adding keywords for SEO is a good way to help your natural search engine rankings.'

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