Well as I sat there sipping a cold coke in Cyprus on a sun bed over looking the Mediterranean I contemplated all the big news that was occurring in the field of search engine marketing in my absence. With Microsoft’s deadline of the April 26 2008 for the purchase of Yahoo already passed I wondered whether the deal had gone ahead or whether Microsoft had acted on their hostile takeover threat. Either way I was assured something big would have happened in the search engine marketing arena.

So I was a little disappointed when I powered on my laptop to find out the deadline had passed without any action at all on Microsoft’s part. So what is going on, were Microsoft’s treats empty ones to the search engine firm.

This must look bad on Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer because he has been pursuing the search engine firm for the last three months and with Yahoo forming closer ties with its rival search engine firm Google, than surely he has potentially lost his grip on the proposed purchase? However this does not appear to be the case as yesterday he was quoted as saying he would walk away from the purchase of the search engine before he overpays for Yahoo. Steve Ballmer told Microsoft staff that he would not pay “a dime” more than he thinks Yahoo is worth.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a hostile bid was still on the cards and that Microsoft will now target Yahoo’s shareholders directly. But if this is the case than I believe that Microsoft would have to seriously consider raising their original bid for the shares. Microsoft originally valued Yahoo at $31 a share, or around $44bn (£22.13bn), but after yesterday’s closing price it has made the offer lower at $29.48 a share ($42.8bn). Yahoo shares closed yesterday at $26.81. There appears to be some reflecting of uncertainty on Wall Street as to whether the Microsoft/Yahoo deal will proceed. But to me I feel that the search engine firm is just holding out for a higher offer, maybe around $35 a share, valuing the search engine company at almost $50bn. Who knows maybe the search engine firm will even go so far as to demand $40 a share.

If the merger was to occur it would give Microsoft a more competitive position against Google’s growing dominance in the area of online search. But if the merger is a hostile one than Microsoft may find it hard to hold onto Yahoo employees and that pool of talent could head Googles way.

So we are still where we were three months ago, Microsoft may make another friendly deal with Yahoo by upping their bid, start hostile takeover fight to replace search engine firms board or simply give up and abandon the bid. Or in Steve Ballmers words “There’s the friendly deal, there’s an unfriendly deal, and the third path is simply to walk away. We ought to announce something in very short order.”

All we know is that Microsoft’s plans are imminent.

We are still waiting!?!

What a week in the search engine marketing (SEM) industry. It all seems to be kicking off with all three of the search engine heavyweights slugging it out for supremacy. Yahoo seems to be the most animated at the moment in the wake of Microsoft’s take over bid for them. The threat of acquisition has ignited Yahoo into action. It appears they have now resorted back to their old ways. Back in the day when Yahoo was Overture they used to use partnerships as a means of gaining market share. Yahoo seems to be going down that road again.

It has been reported in the New York Times that Yahoo have been in talks with AOL, a unit of Time Warner, to form a partnership that would combine both the companies Internet operations. If this was to occur than AOL-Yhaoo would be valued at around $10 billion. Yahoo would also receive a large proportion of cash from Time Warner in exchange for 20% of the Yahoo and AOL partnership. With these additional funds it would allow Yahoo the ability to buy back several billion dollars worth of Yahoo stock and protect them from the growing hostel threat from Microsoft.

Yahoo has also made another show of strength in the field of search engine marketing (SEM). In the area of analytics Google owns Google Analytics and Microsoft have their adCenter Analytics service which is still in its beta stage. So not to feel left out it appears Yahoo is getting in on the analytics action as well. Yahoo has just brought Tensa Kit, which owns the IndexTools web analytics service. However IndexTools is a fee-based product so i’m guessing that in time Yahoo will make this analytics service free because both the analytics services from Google and Microsoft come at no charge. This is a strange move on Yahoo’s part because they already own a set of analytics tools which are offered by Keylime Software. So we will see what free analytics package Yahoo decides to other. That is if they decide to offer a free analytics package at all?

But the biggest shocker this week has been Yahoo’s announcement that they have struck a deal with Google that would mean that these two search engine heavyweights will be sharing advertising space. Both company’s have agreed to run a two-week pilot which will see Google’s paid search adverts run alongside Yahoo’s on Yahoo’s search engine. The pilot will only apply to www.yahoo.com and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries in the US.

So does this mean Yahoo has a longer term plan to join with Google AdSense for Search program? But let’s look at this relationship realistically, between them Google and Yahoo control around 80% of the US search engine market. With this in mind, a formal partnership between Yahoo and Google would surely be deemed anti-competitive and be blocked by US regulations over competition.

So if this Yahoo-Google alliance cannot work out to be long-term relationship than why is Yahoo taking part in this trial. Is this move a desperate attempt to generate more revenue for Yahoo to help battle off Microsoft? Or are they trying to show Microsoft that Yahoo is still a major player in the field of search engine marketing and has other options available to it.

As an observer I must admit that every play Yahoo is currently making in the search engine marketing arena seems to be very timely in light of Microsoft’s takeover bid. But again maybe I am wrong, maybe Yahoo is simply showing the search engine marketing industry that they are still a player - and a major one at that - and can thrive on their own.

Either way it is obvious that Yahoo have now suddenly stepped up their game in search engine marketing and are exploring all strategic alternatives to help maximise their stockholder value which includes the exploration of potential industry partnerships. But a partnership with Google? This isn’t really going to work long term….is it?

Forget Star Wars, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is feeling the force of the “Ad Wars”. As I mentioned in my last blog post Google recently brought DoubleClick Inc, an Internet advertising solutions company, so that they would have a better vehicle for selling display ads. In response to this Microsoft strengthened its armory in search advertising by purchasing aQuantive, the parent company to Avenue A, Razorfish, Atlas and DRIVEpm, for $6 billion.

Now Yahoo has exposed their hand and unveiled their new move in the search advertising industry. Yahoo’s “Apex” project called AMP! is a new advertising management platform to rival Google and Microsoft in search advertising. Yahoo state that AMP! has been designed to streamline and automate online advertising across a variety of target markets, publishers and ad type. The advertising management platform will feature an open API and will include Yahoo! owned-and-operated inventory and more than 600 US newspapers in their Newspaper Consortium.

In a statement Hilary Schneider, Yahoo! EVP of Global Partner Solutions, announced that “While online advertising grows more sophisticated, the process of doing business today is surprisingly cumbersome and manual,” He believes that the AMP! Platform will help remedy this because it can deliver a faster, easier, and more automated and integrated way to create, buy, and sell advertising.

This new advertising platform is still several months away from being released for the general public to use, but Yahoo aims to go live with this new advertising platform by the third quarter of this year. Now Yahoo has invested significantly in the AMP! platform technology so it will be interesting to see if they can deliver on their promise to overcome the inefficiencies that they currently say are constraining the online advertising industry. Let’s see if they really have produced an advertising platform that, in their own words, is “faster, easier, and more automated”.

I personally think the exposure of their new advertising management platform is a strategic and well timed move to help put pressure on Microsoft to up their bid for Yahoo. This is because this new announced about their advertising management platform comes in the wake of Microsoft’s ultimatum that they have a deadline of three weeks to decide whether to accept their $41 billion takeover bid. Microsoft has warned Yahoo that if a deal hasn’t been reached by April 26 2008 then they would launch a hostile takeover at a lower price.

In an official letter to Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corporation, the board of directors at Yahoo wrote; “Our Board has reviewed your most recent letter with regard to the unsolicited proposal you made to acquire Yahoo! on January 31, 2008. Our Board carefully considered your unsolicited proposal, unanimously concluded that it was not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders, and rejected it publicly on February 11, 2008. Our Board cited Yahoo!’s global brand, large worldwide audience, significant recent investments in advertising platforms and future growth prospects, free cash flow and earnings potential, as well as its substantial unconsolidated investments, as factors in its decision.”

However the letter does than go on to say “At the same time, we have continued to make clear that we are not opposed to a transaction with Microsoft if it is in the best interests of our stockholders. Our position is simply that any transaction must be at a value that fully reflects the value of Yahoo!, including any strategic benefits to Microsoft, and on terms that provide certainty to our stockholders.” So it is clear that Yahoo is not opposed to the takeover bid! Their letter clearly expresses that Microsoft have simply not offered what they feel reflects the true value of their company. In the letter they seem to have also made sure that Microsoft are aware of their new investments into advertising platforms in fact they deemed it a “significant” investment.

Can you now see why I’m suspicious of this sudden and timely launch of this new advertising platform? To me it just seems as if Yahoo are now just simply getting out the best china and cutlery and generally pulling out all the stops to hopefully get a better bid price out of Microsoft. However I could be wrong, Yahoo could simply be trying to boost the public’s confidence in their Search Engine to show that they are still a heavy weight contender in the Search Engine and Search Advertising industries and have nothing to fear from the likes of Microsoft.

Well either way we do not have long to wait! It will be interesting to see what move Microsoft now makes if Yahoo do not meet their three week deadline. Will they be impressed enough by Yahoo’s best efforts and dig deeper into their pockets? Or will they tighten the purse strings and become hostile towards them. What will be the next episode in the Ad Wars? I wait with bated breath!

When Google brought DoubleClick, the online advertising company, last month for $3.1 billion it was a tactical move on their part which gave them a voluminous control over the $40.9 billion online ad market, which hasn’t gone down too well with their competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. This was an usual move for Google as this takeover was the largest move the company had made in its nine-year history.

Their has been no effect so far of this acquisition but I do fear it could in the future raise the cost of ad serving for rival intermediaries. I say there has been no effect, but this is not entirely true because last month, Eric Schmidt, the Chairman and CEO of Google announced that their could be a possibility that some jobs may be lost. And true to his word there has been! I read in the New York Times the other day that Google will be reducing the headcount of the American division of DoubleClick by about 25% leaving around 300 employees without jobs or placed into what Google has termed “transitional” roles.

As a search engine optimisation (SEO) company we can see some so very basic conflict of interests going on with this acquisition of DoubleClick. Bundled in with the DoubleClick package came a company called Performics. Now this is where we can see a problem, because Performics, like us here at White Hat Media, provided search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) services. As you will already know search engine optimisation (SEO) is a way of raising a websites rankings in search engines like Google for specific keywords.

As Google’s core business is its search engine it seems that Performics - with Google backing - would have inherited an unfair advantage over search engine optimisation (SEO) companies like us. Here at White Hat Media and at most other search engine optimisation agencies, we are in a constant battle with the Google algorithms to help get our clients websites a higher ranking, on their selected keywords, in the Google search engine.

But now we would have to also compete against Google’s own a search engine optimisation (SEO) agency. The reality is how can any SEO company compete against Google as a rival in a race to get a company to the top of GOOGLE? You cant! We might as well pack up our offices now.

But wait……put that photo of your kids back on your desk and switch you monitor back on…….I haven’t finished yet! I have some good news! Google understands this complete conflict of interest and has now decided to split Performics into two separately run business units, which will be Affiliate Marketing and Search Marketing. They have also officially announced they plan to sell off the Search Marketing element…phew I can slept better at night again now! To date Google has already received preliminary interest in their newly established Search Marketing business unit but no sale as of yet. Fingers crossed they sell it soon, in fact I think we here at White Hat Media should buy it – can anyone lend me a few million pounds.

This is a good move for Google because not only does it keep us search engine optimisation (SEO) companies in business but it reinforces Google’s objectivity as a trusted search engine.

I have been observing Google’s Search Engine optimisation (SEO) Guru Matt Cutts’ blog recently and I noticed this little gem which made me smile. In a post on the 3rd March Matt Cutts gave his views on what he predicts will happen in 2008.

“2008 will be the year that hacking and Search Engine optimisation (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.”

This prediction post is scarily true because as link building becomes more important – and therefore more competitive – as a means of Search Engine optimisation the more under handed SEO techniques are going to be employed to out perform competitors online. There are only so many links you can build ethically before you get to certain link building pinnacle. It’s at that point companies will have to start looking at other means of link building to gain the edge.

Matt Cutts’ prediction regarding Search Engine optimisation (SEO) in the future made me smile because it occurred on the very day that “The Earth Liberation Front” (ELF) website was hacked by a Viagra company. The malicious blackhat SEO technique carried out by this Viagra company involved changing the meta title tags on the ELF website to promote their Viagra products. The navigational links on the website where also changed to point to specific Viagra promotions.

I am suspicious of this whole situation because the actual domain for the ELF website appears to be currently up for sale. This then could potentially mean the website is no longer being maintained or monitored. One theory I have is that the Viagra based company could have brought the domain name and website content after the website was abandoned and used it as a means of link building for their products. Or this could just be a straight forward website hack.

Either way, I have to wonder whether Matt Cutts’ was aware of this website hack and knowing the potential growing threat of blackhat SEO techniques, used this idea for his predication post or whether he really is THAT good a Search Engine optimisation (SEO) Guru that he simply knows what will happen in the future……spooky thought hey!

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media

Dailymotion, a  video hosting service website, has announced the appointment of Kate Burns as their new Managing Director – a new role within the company structure which previously did not exist. Kate Burns previously worked for Google as their Managing Director.

Her new role with Dailymotion will involve improving the brand awareness of the Dailymotion website and increase the level of traffic it receives. Kate Burns was with Google (who bought YouTube in 2006) for six years after joining in 2001 from Altavista where she was the pan-European Sales Director.

Dailymotion, a competitor to YouTube, was launched in 2005 and allows users to view videos online by searching tags, channels or user-created groups. The Dailymotion website im my opinion provide superior video quality in comparison with other flash-enabled video hosting websites. The advange it has over YouTube is that the maximum size of a video per file is 150MB (compared to 100MB for YouTube) and the video limit is 20 minutes (compared with 10 minutes on YouTube’s).

Video hosting website such as Dailymotion and YouTube are now a very effective online marketing tool. Many companies and Serach Engine Markeying agencies alike are discovering that marketing on sites such as YouTube and Dailymotion can bring lots of traffic and therefore lots of sales. Video media is now a very valuable form of promotion and from a Search Engine marketing prospective it is a great way of creating in-bound links to your website. Online videos are a truly fantastic way to promote your business and get more traffic to yuor website without spending a great deal of money.

If you are looking to increase the level of traffic to your website or you would like us to submit your promotional videos to websites such as Dailymotion and YouTube then contact me at White Hat Media on 01273 704 771. White Hat Media are Search Engine Marketing Specialists.

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media 

The Search Engine Strategies Conference & Expo 2008– now in its 9th year – will be held on 19-21 February at the Business Design Centre, London, UK. This search engine marketing event spans four days and covers areas such as search, marketing, optimisation & commerce and focuses on promotional tactics on the web.

Attendance at SES London last year grew by over 50% and this year we expect more of the same. Search marketing is hotter than ever now and the event organises have planned an exciting and impressive line up for us this year. Delegates at this event will be granted access to network with the largest gathering of Search marketing professionals in addition to the most comprehensive SEM/SEO learning opportunity in the UK or Europe. SES Search Marketing Startegies conference will provide instruction from the industry’s top search marketing and optimisation experts, including representatives of the Search Engines themselves.

As well as teaching delegates everything they need to know to help them maximize search engine marketing and optimisation for their business, some of the new topics covered will include:

Search Around The World: Eastern and Western companies are pushing out to international markets, but does anyone really understand the marketplace? Attendees will learn how to separate hype from actionable activity. Leading experts in the Asia/ Pacific, Europe and the Americas discuss the marketplace and the impact it’s having on the world.

All Star Analytics: Successful search analytics strategy is key to maximising ROI. Search engine optimisation and pay per click advertising is pre click. But what happens after the click? A panel will discuss everything from bounce rates, improving conversion, spotting trends and generally elevating your SEO/PPC analysis to a whole new level.

Converting Visitors Into Buyers: Getting visitors to your web site is half the battle. To be victorious, you need them to convert into customers. Learn about making this conversion. The latter part of the session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about changing them to improve visitor conversion.

The host of this year’s Search Engine Strategies conference said: “SES London will provide search marketers, developers and executives with the tools, techniques and advice they need to develop their business locally and on a global scale. There are many other factors to consider with each phase of the online marketing process, including web analytics and site architecture. We have developed a programme to cover every crucial element for successful serach engine marketing.”

By Jason Smith, Business Developmet Manager, White Hat Media Ltd

Social media networking has enjoyed explosive growth over the past three years and as of yet there is no sign that it is levelling off yet. Advertising spending on social media sites in the US is expected show a growth rate of 70%, climbing to $1.6-billion in 2008 from $920-million in 2007. Social networking sites burst into the internet communities online world with a vengeance during 2007.

We believe that social networking will gain even more traction during 2008, as even more users flock to social networking sites and tools. We may see the rise of new social media networking environments during the year, including a rise to prominence by local alternatives to the likes of MySpace and Facebook. Other examples of current social media applications are Google (reference, social networking), Wikipedia (reference), Last.fm (personal music), YouTube (social networking and video sharing), Second Life (virtual reality), and Flickr (photo sharing).

Facebook is a social networking website, launched on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student. Facebook has recorded more than 60 million active users (including non-collegiate members) worldwide. From September 2006 to September 2007 the site’s traffic ranking increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa. It is the number one site for photos in the United States with over 60 million photos uploaded weekly.

In October 2007 Microsoft purchased a 1.6% share in Facebook for $240 million.  An outright sale of Facebook is said to be unlikely as founder Mark Zuckerberg would like to keep it independent. On November 7, 2007, Facebook announced Facebook Ads; Facebook Beacon, a marketing initiative which includes a system for websites to allow users to share chosen information about their activities on the sites with their Facebook friends; the capability of businesses to host pages on Facebook for various brands, products and services (Facebook Pages); a targeted ad serving program based on user and friend profile and activity data (Facebook Social Ads); and a service for providing businesses with advertisement analytic data including performance metrics (Facebook Insights).

MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world’s sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular website in any language, and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks. The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80%of visits to online social networking websites. According to Internet research firm Comscore, almost two-thirds of all Internet users visit MySpace at least once a month.

But don’t for one minute be sitting there thinking “yeah but those sorts of sites are for kids”. Research shows that half of the users visiting social media sites are people over 35. Facebook alone has more than 100,000 users older than 64. These sites are doubling in popularity at ridiculous speeds. I can bet that a number of you now bypass Google and head directly to Wikipedia when searching for certain kinds of information.

The reason for the rise of social media sites isn’t that big a surprise really. It’s the same reason why the telephone - and later the mobile phone - have became popular and why the internet has become indispensable to us now as a communication, marketing and research tool. Can you imagine life without your mobile and access to the internet now!?

The reason for this is that these social media sites have made it easier for us to connect with people on a much deeper level than we could have imagined a few years ago. I’m guessing that a lot of you know a lot more about people you have never met in person than you do about some of your neighbours. I know I’m guilty of this! This is because it’s now easier to collaborate and share information on social sites.

The main point I’m trying to make here is don’t just think these social media site are just playgrounds for children. They are powerful marketing tools and you should not overlook the importance of social media marketing to your business right now, as well as in the future. If you’re currently advertising on Google AdWords, you may want to check out Facebook Ads, which gives businesses another avenue to get in front of the right audience based on demographic and activity data.

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media

It used to be the case that if a web user was to type the words miserable failure into Google they would get the biography of US President George W. Bush on the White House website as the top result. The reason for this is that Google searches more than just the contents of web pages - it also place high importance on how many in-bound links a website has pointing to it and what words that actual link say. Using specific terms (or anchor text) as hyperlinks to another website is a very power search engine marketing tool. Because of the way that Google’s algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

However this search engine marketing technique has been misused by the members of the online community who Google Bomb sites to get the pages ranked highly for humorous or political intentions. A Google bomb (also referred to as a ‘link bomb’) is an internet slang term for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine. A Google bomb is created if a large number of sites link to the page in this manner. The man behind the “miserable failure” Google bomb was George Johnston, a political activist and software programmer in Bellevue, Washington, USA. 

Google has finally won its war on the miserable failure result and defused that specific Google Bomb. But the wasn’t to help Bush keep face amongst the online community, it was instead part of an overall algorithm change designed to stop such mass in-bound link pranks from working. Google said in its official blog that “by improving our analysis of the link structure of the Web” such mischief would instead “typically return commentary, discussions, and articles” about the tactic itself. Writing on the blog, Matt Cutts, who specialising in search engine marketing for Google said that Google bombs had not “been a very high priority for us.” But he added: “Over time, we’ve seen more people assume that they are Google’s opinion or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Google-bombed queries. That’s not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception.”

Despite these changes by Google against using this search engine marketing tool as a means of playing pranks, some other Google bombs still exist. If you type in the words “French military victories”, the first result at the top of Google says, “Your search — French military victories — did not match any documents.” If you click on this site you will find a mock up of a Google search page asking the question “Did you mean: French military defeats.”

By Jason Smith, Business Development Manager, White Hat Media 

Search Wikia, a new open source search engine was launched today in an alpha version. Search Wikia is the brain child of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his company Wikia, Inc. Wikia Search aims to improve search by letting users change search results in a fashion similar to how users edit entries on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wale has stated that this new search tool will reduce the “bottleneck of two or three firms really controlling the flow of search traffic.”

Wikia Search was born initially in July 2007 when Wikia, Inc acquired a distributed search project called Grub and Jimmy Wales announced he was going to release this product with an open-source license. But there are many people in the online community that are sceptical about this new search engine and its ability to dethrone a giant like Google. Sceptics believe that Jimmy Wales does not really understand the scale of what Google has to handle in terms of the queries from around the world. 

The question on every ones lips is will Search Wikia and its user-edited model be able to scale to the demands of consumer search engines. Google indexes billions of pages and has become deep rooted into daily lives of internet usres, providing them with highly targeted search results, Wikia Search on the other hand will launch its search engine today with only around 50 to 100 million Web pages indexed. It’s truly a David vs. Goliath battle. Even though this new internet search tool has been now officially released, Search Wikia is still essentially useless as a search engine because even Search Wikia admit themselves that the search results being produced are currently very poor.

Lets now sit back and see if Search Wikia can in time start to index the same amount of websites as Google and more importantly will they be able to stay ahead of the spammers.