SEO Articles

Visit Rank for $ales

Read my bio

email me

Home

My 2 featured articles for the week ending Dec. 8, 2006:

Archived blogs for the week of Dec. 11, 2006

1282 - Dec. 12, 2006 - 2.04 PM EST

Yahoo's new Panama SEM platform

Today, Yahoo is showing its Panama search marketing platform to new US advertisers, two months after its first beta release to other Internet marketers.

Yahoo's slow rollout seems to be taking off. The company was able to develop its campaign management platform with constant feedback from early adopters.

John Slade, Yahoo's senior director of product management says "Yahoo has been responsive to suggestions on how to improve the transformative upgrade".

Slade added "there were some people that wanted to get in and start using the new features right away. Others may have business reasons to wait." He added "different customers have different comfort levels. But now we're ready to open it up to the masses."

Yahoo will add even more features into the first quarter of 2007, but Slade said the company is satisfied that it will be able to be responsive to the needs of a large group of advertisers migrating to the new platform.

Yahoo first presented Panama in August at SES-San Jose. It then began a limited launch of the platform two months ago.

In late January or early February, Yahoo will turn on its new SEM ranking algorithm, which takes into account more factors than simply bid price to determine ad ranking, as Google does with its Quality Score concept.

Then Yahoo will roll out its new Panama platform to advertisers outside of the U.S.

One of the big underlying ideas of Panama is a desire to greatly simplify the platform for new users, while retaining and building up advanced features for more experienced users, Slade said.

To that end, Yahoo has made initial sign-up a five-step process, which only asks advertisers for minimal details to get a campaign up and running rapidly.

"Yahoo isn't asking search marketers to learn to use all the bells and whistles for the first time.

Testing has shown that users aren't interested in learning the full complexity right away," Slade said.

New users can get started quickly by providing regional targeting preferences, desired keywords, campaign budget, and ad copy for their first ad. Then the advertiser only needs to supply a credit card to launch the campaign. On subsequent log-ins, users will be presented with the more advanced features. Read more...

Posted on Businessblog™

1281 - Dec. 11, 2006 - 3.12 PM EST

Yahoo's search share dropping

Yahoo’s web search share experienced a big drop in November, after it had gained a few points in October.

Yahoo’s search market share went down 3.6 points to under 21 percent.

Yahoo's absolute decline was even worse when you take into account that total web search queries were down from October to November.

It will be interesting to watch Yahoo carefully in the next 2 to 3 months to see if this trend reverses itself or not.

I was surprised (more like shocked) to read these fresh new numbers.

Now we are finding out more and more why Yahoo made so many changes to its top brass executives last week...

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2006. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.