If you think walking a mile in Yahoo! CEO Jerry Yang’s shoes is tough these days, imagine being Susan Decker.

A year ago, she was on top of the world. Decker was a rare shooting star at Yahoo!, promoted to the company’s presidency after Terry Semel unceremoniously left the company last year. She joined the Berkshire Hathaway board of directors, leading some to wonder whether she was on the short list of eventual replacements for Warren Buffett himself. She’s even the youngest board member at Costco .

Things change. When Microsoft walked away from Yahoo!, it left behind a sea of shareholders who are now irate with Yahoo!’s executives, Decker included.

Until now, Decker has been untouchable. Her salaries and bonuses have inched higher without much dissent; if Charlie Munger (who also sits on the Costco board) and Buffett see a spark in Decker, who are we to argue otherwise?

However, leave it to a mob of angry investors to toss out the lady with the bathwater. They may tie her ascent at Yahoo! with the company’s descent in everything from search-engine market share to profitability. If Yang can’t turn the company around in a hurry, do you think investors will be satisfied if he’s ultimately replaced by anyone but an outsider?

As fate would have it, Decker was with Bill Gates in Omaha over the weekend, when Microsoft turned its back on Yahoo!. Decker and Gates serve on the Berkshire Hathaway board, and Decker actually serves with Gates’ dad on Costco’s board.

Forget Yang, Gates, and Steve Ballmer. Decker is really the most interesting character in this whole Microhoo saga. She’s the one with ties to both companies. She’s the one who can either bring Microsoft back to the table, or convince investors that Yahoo! may be worth more than $33 a share in the near future.

In short, she’s Yahoo!’s last hope — the one hire that Microsoft or even Google would love to have on their side. With her reputation on the line, I’d be shocked if she didn’t either take on an even bigger role in turning Yahoo! around, in a “double or nothing” kind of career wager — or move on before her spectacular climb becomes an equally steep fall.

Forget Yahoo! and Microsoft. Watch Decker.

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Source: themoneytimes

Microsoft has announced it is dropping it bid to acquire one of their Internet competitors, Yahoo!, after a three-month courting effort by Microsoft.

Microsoft chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer notified Yahoo! chief executive officer, chairman and co-founder, Jerry Yang via a letter that Microsoft was dropping their bid for the Sunnyvale, California based search engine giant.

In a press release from Microsoft, Ballmer said, “Despite our best efforts, including raising our bid by roughly US$5 billion, Yahoo! has not moved toward accepting our offer. After careful consideration, we believe the economics demanded by Yahoo! do not make sense for us, and it is in the best interests of Microsoft stockholders, employees and other stakeholders to withdraw our proposal”.

Microsoft withdrew its bid effort after raising their bid from $44.6 billion to $47.5 billion, which works out at $33 per share. However, Yahoo! were waiting for a bid of around $53 billion, which was more than Microsoft were willing to pay.

Microsoft had previously wanted to takeover Yahoo! in-order to compete with Google, the market leader in online advertising. The online advertising market was worth $40 billion in 2007 and will rise to an expected $80 billion in 2010.

Some observers, however, are speculating that the bid withdrawal could just be another tactic in their attempt to acquire Yahoo!.

Source: en.wikinews.org

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Deep links are an important to do in SEO. It’s a making of a hyperlink that points to a specific page or image instead of website’s home page. The percentage of inbound links from other sites to pages other than your homepage can be determined by the number of deep links to non optimized links.

Deep links are one of the most effective off page factors. For deep links:

1. determine the pages having most link weight
2. determine optimized pages with the appropriate anchor text
3. combine internal links that are corresponding with page theme
4. use deep links to give them load in search engines for a higher score

At the time of building links, to determine what Google deems as the most relevant page for your keywords in your site here is a command:

site:domain.com keyword or key phrase

Here replace the domain with your own site domain and the keywords with the keywords you want to emphasize. The page at the top of this search result represents the most worthy page to build deep links. Highlight, that page as a favorable landing page.

You should not have your homepage optimized for more than a couple of keyword phrases. Your SEO efforts should included internal pages optimized for different keywords. Internal directory links will help your search engine rankings.

With strong internal links, the first thing you should do is perform a content and link audit.

1. Remove IRRELEVANT keywords.
2. Create a new page to keep the focus i.e links leaving the page should not more than 10 per page.
3. Make sure your main keyword/phrase is on the page as well as in the title at least one time
4. Don’t try to optimize a page for more than 3 keywords.
5. If you are using contextual links, from one page to other pages in the site, instead of navigation then make sure that you are using the main keywords for the page that you are trying to rank with.
6. Use style sheets to keep your programming code offpage.
7. Use your main keyword once in the h1 and with a slight variation in an H2 tag.

“Having Biggest Link is Not Important as Having Better Placed Links…!!!

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