“Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.”

The news arrived via press release saturday evening that Microsoft and company are through with making any more extended efforts to Yahoo and company. I have posted the letter so that you may read it for yourself and draw your own personalized conclusions from what is said in it. One of the feelings that can be taken away from this whole situation is that Yang feels that it would not be in the shareholders best interest to accept Microsofts offer of acquisition.

So, many are probably wondering why does Yahoo feel they are worth much more than what Microsoft thinks that they are? None of us know the entire story of what companies and the board may have projected into the future. Did Ballmer overextend an offer to an overvalued company? Are they really worth what Yang thinks they are?

One point that is clear is that Yahoo has certainly wrapped up user subscriptions in mass quantities. Microsoft has certainly designed a lot of software in its existence, but do they have the same subscription base that Yahoo has built up over the years. I am asking a lot of questions as you have probably noticed. I do this to encourage your mind to engage in really thinking of many different points of views.

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Web linking is one of the most effective search engine optimization techniques. Search engine optimization (SEO) is important because it increases your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs) of major search engines, leading to increased visibility. This visibility means greater hits and consequently greater ROI or return on investment. There are several tips that will ensure that your website linking is effective. These include:

Create quality content – some of the most effective links are contextual links. These include links in blog comments and links in press releases. The content where these links are placed should attract Web users and it should bring you out as an expert in your field. The content should be short and to the point and it should be interesting.

Use White Hat SEO techniques only – Black Hat SEO link building techniques such as buying links from link farms will lead to instant results, but they could lead to the banning of your website by search engines. You should only use naturally simulated links and you should increase the links gradually.

Link building strategy – you will need a web site linking strategy if your link building campaign is to be effective. The strategy should borrow heavily from strategies that have been tried and tested, but it should be customized since we all have different needs.

Use different Web linking methods – consider using different linking methods to increase your odds of success. You could get links from blog commenting, from articles in article submission directories, in website submission directories, in Squidoo lenses, in social networking sites, in social bookmarking and voting sites, and in forums in your niche through forum signatures. You could get reciprocal links, you could get resource links and you could do link baiting.

Hire a website linking company – hiring a pro for link building is a good idea since these pros have the necessary experience, training, and contacts, meaning your Web linking campaign is more likely to be effective. Link building can be time and energy consuming and hiring a pro therefore gives you unparalleled convenience. Hiring a pro is also advantageous in that you save money since it means you do not need to hire an in-house IT team.

Use other SEO techniques – you should combine link building with other SEO techniques if you are to achieve success in search engine optimization. You could combine web site linking with the use of Squidoo lenses, sitemap creation, reputation management and the use of Meta tags.

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 May 3, 2008

    Mr. Jerry Yang
    CEO and Chief Yahoo
    Yahoo! Inc.
    701 First Avenue
    Sunnyvale, CA 94089

    Dear Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

    -- First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!'s own strategy and
       long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed
       to your Panama paid search system.  This would also fragment your
       search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem
       surrounding them.  This would undermine the reliance on your display
       advertising business to fuel future growth.

    -- Given this, it would impair Yahoo's ability to retain the talented
       engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our
       interest in a combination of our companies.

    -- In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems
       that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit.  Among
       other things, this would consolidate market share with the
       already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce
       competition and choice in the marketplace.

    -- This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key
       search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the
       process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo.  In addition to
       whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business
       perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle
       to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

    -- It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search
       provider that is not already relying on Google's search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

    But clearly a deal is not to be.

    Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

    Sincerely yours,
    /s/ Steven A. Ballmer

    Steven A. Ballmer
    Chief Executive Officer
    Microsoft Corporation

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Yesterday Yahoo announced that they had made some upgrade changes to one of their new creations which is still in beta, Yahoo Buzz. The change that you may notice the most is a “Top Buzz” widget you can use. Many different types of internet users can integrate this widget right into their websites to use as they see fit from their own place of comfort. Yahoo Buzz is a somewhat new way to quickly find out what top stories in many different categories are being searched and voted for by many internet savvy users who decide to participate in this Yahoo Buzz Fun. You can vote up or down what buzzes the most or the least. Its definitely interesting to watch this creation unfold in the Yahoo styled format.

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The submission of site links and titles to Web directories is one of the most effective search engine optimization techniques. Web directory submissions are also advantageous in that they expose you to a global audience, they lead to brand awareness, and they provide a platform for you to search for link exchange partners. There are free and paid web directory submission sites. Free submission has the obvious advantage of saving you money, but paid web directory submission has a lot more benefits. These benefits include:

Quick and guaranteed/near guaranteed acceptance – submission to large directory submission sites such as Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project (ODP) is associated with slow acceptance. This is unacceptable, particularly to Internet marketers. Paid submissions are given priority and you will almost be sure that you will be accepted.

Website owner’s supervision – a paid web directory submission is advantageous in that there is no risk of your time and effort going to waste due to the vanishing of free directories, which is a common occurrence. The fact that you pay for your submission means a lot of time and effort will be paid to your submission, meaning your site will always be clean. The service you pay for includes maintenance by the best brains in the job.

Permanent backlinks and one-way links – paid Web directory submissions are advantageous in that you get permanent backlinks. Permanent backlinks are important because Google values them and they are a major determinant of ranking. These links are often one-way links. These links are important because they do not require reciprocating, thereby adding to the credibility of your site.

Deep URLs – you get deeper links with paid Web directory submissions than you do with other SEO techniques, meaning you will achieve search engine optimization and there will be balance in all the Web pages in your site.

Unique content – in most cases, the Webmaster will be allowed to write a short descriptive paragraph about the site with a paid web directory submission. This information will lead to increased ROI.

Specific keyword targeting – paid submissions allow for use of targeted keywords. This is advantageous in that increased traffic through the search engine results page.

Other advantages of paid Web directory submissions are that you get long term results since paid directories are usually credible and reliable and will probably outlive you, they are safer and clutter-free, you get little or no distractions, and you are guaranteed SEO and ranking.

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The Microsoft board has met once again to discuss what some of their options could be in regards to the Yahoo situation which they are facing right now. They met on wednesday to go over which option they should choose in moving forward with the takeover of Yahoo. Will they wage a proxy fight against Yahoo to the stockholders? Will they decide not to go ahead with the acquisition? Will they offer Yahoo more of what they want? They failed to decide what to do at the present time. I’m thinking they will come up with a definitive solution to what the next step should in good time. Look for Google to continue along looking like a winner as Yahoo and Microsoft battle it out.

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One of the greatest reasons that a company that makes money via websites is because of the low costs that are involved with the initial startup. It gives a lot of people that know their way around a computer a chance to make money really fast. Well, at least faster than the traditional way of starting a company at a very slow pace until it proved successful over time. Many companies require a lot more equipment than just a computer. Also, you can run this business from almost anywhere that you can get an internet connection. That’s very appealing to many. It’s not always physically demanding, but it will drain your brain juice in a big hurry if your not prepared mentally.

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Businesses need to advertise their products and services to create awareness and convince potential customers to buy them. With so many people increasingly using the Internet to find the products and services that they need, businesses are now taking Internet advertising every seriously. With so many websites competing for customers in every business niche, businesses have to come up with ways of making their websites the most popular so as to attract more traffic. Over 85% of website traffic comes from the major search engines so the main aim of any strategy is to have the website ranking high on search engine result pages.

There are various Internet advertising strategies that you can employ to ensure that your website achieves the desirable top rankings on search engine result pages. Some of these strategies include press releases, social marketing, link building, and directory submissions. It helps to have some high quality back links from highly reputable sites, whether they are permanent one-way links or reciprocal links. The major search engines consider link popularity as a major criterion when ranking websites. As such, if you can get yourself some popular links your website will be readily picked up by the major search engines.

There are other ways through which you can carry out Internet advertising to increase traffic to your website. You can target your potential customers directly through niche advertising on social media sites. These sites are very popular with people and usually attract millions of visitors on a daily basis. A strategically placed advert on a major social media site will attract the attention of people who might be interested in your products or services. When they click on the advert, they will be directed through a link to your business website where they will expect to find more useful information about your products or services.

Ad words are a cheap way of reaching potential clients with specific texts that are displayed on search engines. You should incorporate targeted keywords when coming up with ad words so that they end up on results pages for searches related to your products and services. The people making such searches will see the ad words and know that your business can help them find whatever they are looking for. Whichever form of Internet advertising you choose to use, you should always do an inventory of the results so that you know whether your campaigns are successful or not.

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Forrester Research estimates that social networking will be a huge priority of “Enterprise 2.0.” Analyst G. Oliver Young predicts that “Enterprise 2.0″ applications will be a $4.6 billion industry by 2013. Social networks will make up the bulk of that, with nearly $2 billion invested in them. This seems to be on track with where most feel it should be heading for the future.

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In an effort to create a safer experience for the everyday user at Paypal, they have decided to block certain web browsers from accessing their website. There are 5 specific areas that the company would like to address first.

1. Prevent fraudulent e-mail from getting into users’ in-boxes

2. Prevent phishing sites by shutting them down

3. Authenticate users so that stolen credentials can’t be used on PayPal

4. Prosecute fraudsters to the full extent of the law

5. Focus on brand and consumer recovery

Out of these 5 items, the focus is mainly on e-mail prevention and phishing-site blocking. Browsers need to contain anti-phishing tools. This is all according to a paper sent out to their shareholders.

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