SEO Blog

“And when you’re up, you’re up,
and when you’re down you’re down,
and when you’re only half-way up,
you’re neither up nor down”.
- The Grand Old Duke of York, nursery rhyme c. 1793

Yahoo! has released Q1 2008 numbers in advance of it’s investors’ conference call which starts in about ten minutes. The report shows that Yahoo! made slightly more money in the past three months than it did in the similar quarter of 2007, but not much more. The report also shows that Yahoo!’s earnings are down slightly from the last reported quarter, Q4 2007.

Yahoo! reports revenues of $1.352billion in Q1-08, a $169million or 14% improvement over the same period last year. While still proving growth in billable services such as paid search advertising and display advertising, Yahoo!’s growth comes at a slower pace than that of rival Google. Still, a 14% increase is likely higher than expected by investors and certainly higher than anticipated by the search marketing community.

That wasn’t enough to improve the net-income per share projections which have hovered around the twelve cent mark for the past year. In fact, Yahoo!’s income-per-share declined by two cents per share from Q4-07 to $0.11/share, the same return offered in Q1-07.

(Article originally published in WebProNews as part of a ten-part expert article series on SEO. An episode of Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM also covered points in this article)

Content Is King

Content is king. More than a truism, the phrase is a mantra. Content is the stuff people are looking for on a website. A commitment to developing and deploying great page, document and site content is a commitment to good SEO.

Comprised of the most common site elements, content is the most effective tool SEOs have to work with. Loosely defined as All Things On-Page, the term “content” would include titles, tags, text, in-site links and out-bound links. In some SEO practices, the acronym ATOP is used to refer to the hands-on work environment. (ATOP, i.e.: Mark sends the keyword targets to Jade whose staff works ATOP in the overall SEO effort) Content optimization is where creative art gets mixed into the webmaster science of SEO.

In the SEO process, content optimization describes most of the hands-on work done to make unique documents place well in search engine rankings. For the purposes of search engine optimization; content either exists, has to be created, or both.

All eyes on on Yahoo! this afternoon as they are preparing to release their Q1-2008 report at 2PM pacific (about 45-minutes from now). This report is the most important one in the company’s fourteen year history as it will dictate the terms of Microsoft’s hostile take-over bid and the future of one of the oldest and most identifiable online brands.

Yahoo! shares have stayed fairly stable throughout the day, trading in the mid $28 range, suggesting investors are not dumping the stock in anticipation of a poor showing. At the same time, it should be noted that Yahoo! share prices have not peaked above the $31-dollar per share offer Microsoft put on the table, which suggests The Street feels Microsoft has made a fair offer.

If Yahoo! shows strong results from the first three months of 2008, the take-over attempt by Microsoft will be that much harder. If, however, Yahoo!’s numbers are weak, especially in the face of Google’s excellent report last week, the Microsoft bid will almost certainly become a reality.
We’ll just have to wait a few more minutes to see what develops. Stay tuned…