Yahoo! announced on their Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog that they are hosting a free one hour webinar that will demonstrate why using adding Yahoo! My Display Ads into your marketing mix can energize your search campaigns. The webinar will be held this coming Thursday, November 19, at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. You can register for the webinar here.

Yahoo! My Display Ads is an innovative display advertising solution that allows you to easily create your own banner ads and run them across the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! claims that their service isn’t just for big companies. Today, they have opened their doors to smaller businesses and individuals. They offer an easy and affordable way for you to create banner ads and run them across their entire Yahoo! network.

Creating ads is simple. Yahoo! insists that designers are not needed and that there are no development costs involved. Yahoo! My Display Ads comes with design tools that will help you create and customize your own banners. The ad system also offers campaign targeting. You can specify the geographic locations, site-content categories, and demographics you want. Additionally, you have the option to set a daily budget, and control the pay per click and cost per impression rates. Lastly, Yahoo! My Display Ads offer performance tracking. You can get daily reports on clicks, impressions, and conversions. There’s also tools that allow you to maximize your ad performance.

By attending this free webinar, you will You will learn: The benefits of combining search and display advertising, more about Yahoo!’s innovative display advertising and targeting solutions, display advertising best practices, and how other business owners are succeeding with display advertising. I recommend tuning in. It’s free and the webinar will begin during the afternoon, so you can kick back and listen in while you have lunch.

So far you’ve probably noticed that Yahoo! has shut down many of their old services such as Yahoo360 and GeoCities. And then you may have discovered that Yahoo! has released a new marketing campaign, homepage, search engine, and have started going nuts about selling ads in their new search result pages.

A lot is changing with Yahoo!, and even the famous yodel is subject to change. In fact, earlier last week, Yahoo! set up a mobile recording studio in the middle of Times Square and invited anyone passing by to record their version of the yodel. Lucky winners with the best yodel will become famous and earn bragging rights that their yodel is the official Yahoo! yodel. The yodel was one of the things discussed in the interview with Elisa Steele.

She offered assurance that Yahoo! was going to continue using the original yodel; however, to align properly with their promise of making Yahoo! all about about person relevance, they are going to be collecting personal yodels around the globe. In fact, in addition to setting up mobile studios, such as the one in Times Square, Yahoo! has created a web based Yodel Studio.

So you might wonder why would Yahoo! want to re-brand after 15 years of being one of the most widely recognized and successful companies in the world. It may seem strange that Yahoo is investing time and money into creating one of the largest re-branding campaigns ever. Yahoo decided to launch their new brand campaign is to remind consumers where Yahoo! is today, and the kind of services they can offer people in the modern era of the Internet today. Check out this video below that captures the exclusive thoughts of Elisa Steele behind the new Yahoo! marketing campaign.

This Q&A with Elisa Steele is the first in a new series of videos called Yahoo! Yodelcasts, hosted by Nicki Dugan, blog editor for Yahoo!

To stay on top of current events and news about Yahoo! I recommend reading their Yodel Anecdotal blog and subscribing to their RSS Feed. It wouldn’t hurt to pick up a subscription to their YouTube Channel as well.

What are your thoughts about the new Yahoo! and do you think that their new marketing efforts will cause you to switch to using Yahoo! Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Last month, Yahoo! unveiled the new and improved Yahoo! Search. One of the key elements of their new and enhanced version of search claims to give users more control over the results they see by allowing users to filter results by website. Consequently, offering control to advertisers is something Yahoo! wants to deliver as well. They are doing so by including sponsored ads in the filtered search results.

With Yahoo!’s new search page, users can search for various keywords and phrases, and then refine the search results by clicking on the names of sites that appear on the left side. These sites appear based on what other people have found useful in the past. When users click on these featured sites, the results are then filtered to display results only from that particular domain.

How that works with advertisers is when a user selects a site that is also a sponsored search advertisers, that advertisers’ advertisement will be displayed again in the new set of results. The advertisers will only pay if the user clicks on the ad. All in all, the advertisers still receive the same opportunity to receive clicks prior to any filtering. However, advertisers whose sites show up on the left side as a filtering site option will receive futher opportunities to receive clicks.

I like the idea of Yahoo! displaying sponsored ads in filtered results. Doing so creates a very strong opportunity for advertisers to experience an increase in CTR simply because once a users has applied the site filter, ads are going to be displayed to more relevant traffic, and existing there is far less sponsored ad competition.

Some people might question the amount of exposure the filtered ads will receive. I have to say that I think having the navigation options on the left really increase the awareness of the features being available. I think advertisers might find that they’re getting pretty good exposure, clicks, and qualified leads for the money invested. If you’re interested in advertising online, advertising on Yahoo! is something I would consider looking into.

In a press release, Yahoo! said that they are launching a new global brand campaign to celebrate its connection with people and communicate core product enhancements. This global brand campaign will be considered their single largest global intergrated marketing campaign ever. They claim that the core of their message will focus on YOU.

Yahoo! says that the global campaign will celebrate all of your individual wants, needs, interests, and passions. Yahoo! further explains the reasons behind this is because they really care about you and want to continue evolving their company to adapt more towards being able to offer you more of what you want and less of what you don’t. They say that they want to make the web your own, and they’re designing products that put you in control of your Internet experience.

Elisa Steele, the executive vice president of Yahoo! said that their vision is to be at the center of people’s online lives and claims that the gloabl brand campaign is more than an advertising campaign. She said that it’s about delivering a promise to the market and an illustration of their level of commitment to provide a relevant online experience for users.

With the launch of this new campaign comes the launch of a new website called, Y!ou and Yahoo!. The site is designed to house all the elements of the campaign. On the site you can learn more about global brand campaign, share information and opinions with others in various official Yahoo! social network profiles, download audio news releases, and view official television creatives and banners.

Today Yahoo! launched their all new Yahoo! Search, claiming to make results more presonally relevant. According to Yahoo!, they have been soft testing their new engine with a percentage of users. Yahoo! claims that their new search is designed to help users find and explore their interests better by enhancing user experiences.

In addition to the newly launched Yahoo! search, there have been quite a few surprises occurring with Yahoo! over the last few months. The first big was their newly launched Yahoo! homepage. If it’s been awhile since you’ve been to Yahoo!, you might want to check it out. You can now use apps to view your favorite sites from the comfort of the Yahoo! homepage.

Other recent improvements include a new and enhanced version of their Yahoo! Mail, as well as higher quality video calling features in Yahoo! Messenger. Lastly, Yahoo! has a new suite of mobile features worth checking out as well. All in all, things are looking pretty good for Yahoo! At least I can say that they’re actively trying. And you know what, I think they are doing quite well. I actually enjoy visiting Yahoo! again. That’s something I couldn’t say just a year ago. Much has changed, and I hope they continue moving in a forward direction.

What are your thoughts? Do you think Yahoo! will succeed in the long term, or will they eventually become a dot Com failure? I’d really hate to see Yahoo! go, would it matter to you though? Share your thoughts below.

You may be wondering how to syndicate content on your website. Part of having a really cool website is producing useful information for your viewers. I am sure that you’ve heard the saying, “Content is King” and to be honest, I believe that. I believe that in order for a site to stand above the crowd and win against rival competitors, it needs to have a lot of content on it and things users can do.

That said, If you look at many popular sites online you may notice that much of the content found on these sites are syndicated. Meaning, the content wasn’t originally produced on these sites. Instead it was pulled from other sources and republished. Reflecting back, you may now realize this, and this is something you can do too.

Now, make no mistake, syndicating content doesn’t replace the task of writing your own. In fact, producing your own unique content is vital towards the health and overall success of your site. If you fail to produce your own content, people will not take a long term interest to your site, nor will search engines.

Gaining excellent rankings in search engines is very important. It’s obvious that your site depends on people visiting it. But, what you might not realize is that your site is more likely to be visited by people via search engines. So, if search engines don’t like your site, then people won’t be likely to find your site. Having all that past us, let’s now talk about Yahoo! Pipes.

Yahoo! Pipes is a powerful composition tool used to aggregate, manipluate, and mashup content from around the web. Using this tool, you can combine many feeds into one, sort them, filter them, and even translate the data into a different language. Further, you’re able to geocode your favorite feeds, and even create powerful widgets and badges for your site.

I have been using Yahoo! Pipes for almost two years. Using Yahoo! Pipes doesn’t require any special training or skills. Although, I’ll admit, if you do have prior experience with programming, using Pipes will come much easier. With any program or tool, it’s important to invest time into reading tutorials so that you can get more familiar with it. Also, in my experience, I can say that the more you play around and experiment with Yahoo! Pipes, the better.

All in all, I have made some really interesting pipes in the last two years. And the great news is that there have been multiple improvements made to Yahoo! Pipes since I started using the composition tool. One of the most appealing features is their widgets. Using the widgets and badges, you’re able to syndicate and show off your creations directly on your sites, thus making them more useful and appealing to your visitors.

Once again, it’s all about providing the best resource to your visitors. There is nothing wrong with syndicating content as long as you have a balance of your own content in place. Using Yahoo! Pipes coupled with a blog, Wiki, or a message board will give you a very balanced and well rounded site that will appeal to not only visitors but search engines as well.

After you play around with Yahoo! Pipes, share what you have created in the comments below. Also, if you run into any snags with the tool, I’ll try to help answer some of your questions.

Are you looking to download the Bing iPhone App? It’ll be coming very soon. In fact, in the near future, you can start to see a lot of Bing mixed into other applications on the iPhone. On Aug. 27th, 2009 Microsoft released a brand new software developer kit geared towards making it less complicated for Apple iPhone developers to incorporate Bing into their applications.

What does that mean to you? Well, if you’re not ranking well on Bing, it means that you could be potentially missing out on a lot of traffic to your site. As you may know, Google is the default search engine for the iPhone Safari web browser. People have the choice to use Yahoo! but the switch has to be manually made. Lastly, if users want to use Bing, they have to actually type the URL into the browser.

With over 21 million iPhones sold, and having Bing migrated into various applications that use search, there will soon be a resource of traffic available for grabs. Whether you take advantage of this traffic is up to you. All that is needed is to assure that your site is optimized for Bing. Ultimately, I suggest to optimize your site for local search using localized keywords such as zip codes and surrounding cities. Not only will this help your ranking in Bing, but you may find that your re-optimizations help improve your rankings in Google and Yahoo! too.

How much mobile SEO focus do you personally apply to your site? Do you keep track of your mobile traffic? What things do you do towards optimizing your site for mobile users? Lastly, do you think having Bing incorporated into iPhone Apps will help Microsoft? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Yahoo! has had it’s share of struggles over the years. As we are all well aware, the company has been faced with the challenges of keeping up with the trends of social networking. It has been a rough and costly journey. You may recall the closing of Yahoo! 360 and announced the closure of GeoCities happening this October.

I would more say that Yahoo! has been behind the social networking wave and have been struggling to keep up. Recently, Yahoo! made an update to their homepage which made an attempt to attract and retain users to their site by offering new widgets that allow users to access their accounts from some of the more popular sites online such as FaceBook. To drive the company forward even further, Yahoo! has unveiled a new FaceBook style feature in Yahoo! Mail, which gives users the ability to post status updates. These updates have a very similar feel like FaceBook or Twitter. At this point in time, I think Yahoo! is better off continuing to develop ways to cater to social networking rather than compete with the contenders within the social networking.

One of the most breaking news occurred today with Yahoo! announcing the acquisition of a popular Arabic Internet services site called, Maktoob.com (#1, #2, #3). At this time, the price Yahoo! paid is not known. The acquisition is estimated to be fully complete by forth quarter of this year.

On Maktoob.com, Arabic users can get the latest news, keep up with business, socialize online, perform Internet research, follow popular sports events, and even search real estate. For the most part, this portal site has a lot of Yahoo! characteristics. In fact, if you view the site, while not paying too much attention, you’d might even think you were visiting Yahoo.com. One of the most popular services on Maktoob.com is their free email service.

Maktoob.com claims to be the first web based Arabic email provider on the Internet. They offer users the ability to send and receive email, and create and organize folders within the Inbox all in Arabic language. Additional features allow users to change the appearance of their screen when logged in, auto scan email for viruses, and access other web based email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, HotMail.

So what is your opinion? Do you think it was a good idea for Yahoo! to purchase Maktoob.com? Do you think this acquisition will help Yahoo! in the long run, or be another typical Yahoo! acquisition blunder similar to the GeoCities acquisition? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

I don’t know if many people remember this, but there was some drama a year ago with the launch of a new search engine called Cuil (pronounced cool… like cool beans!). The search engine was created by a former employee of Google, Anna Patterson and her husband, Tom Costello. When I used Cuil for the first time, I really didn’t think it was all that cool. To me, it seemed like a dark color spin off version of Google. (Go figure, right?)

Many years ago when Google took search by storm, I believe that they too also recognized the fact that “search” really isn’t the most important thing to people who use the Internet. Personalization and communication were vital too. While indeed there was a huge buzz about Google, many people just couldn’t make that official “switch” from setting their home page set from places such as Yahoo over to them. Reason being, Google didn’t provide everything an Internet user needed in order to be called home.

Google didn’t have email, they didn’t have forums and groups and they didn’t have news. Over the years Google has been quick to recognize this and has made efforts towards providing Internet users with these personalized features so that they indeed can called “Home”. Many people now set Google to their browsers home page. Granted, I don’t think Google does a very good job letting people know about their services, but at least they try. Cuil.com right now is what I would a black sheep duplicate of Google five years ago. Cuil.com’s home page is black with a search bar, while Google’s home page was — five years ago — white with a search bar.

So here we are, one year later, and what has Cuil done since then? I haven’t really heard any news about them other than the celebration of their first year anniversary and some more recent news that have rubbed a few people the wrong way. As it seems, Cuil decided to write a review and provide their opinion about Bing. In their post, they explained about how they performed various tests such as query tests and spam tests and issued out some fancy numbers that apparently is supposed to make Cuil look “Cool.” I am not really buying into it. But, most importantly… their review isn’t going to make me change my homepage from Google to Cuil. Nor would it make me change from Yahoo! or MSN or BING to Cuil. Nor would it even make feel compelled to actually use their search engine.

I have to admit, I’d bet the farm that Bing will find success quicker than Cuil (Actually, they already have.) I mean, really… why would anyone try to duplicate Google. Or, for that matter, why would anyone try to create a new search engine? I have to admire Cuil for trying, but things really don’t look very bright in their future. Perhaps, that is why they decided to use a black background on their site. Maybe Cuil would have a chance if they provided useful things to users. On the surface of things – and I am sure there is plenty below – it seems like Cuil is nothing more than a lower quality copy of Google. Seriously, what does Cuil have that Google, Bing, and Yahoo! don’t? If there is something I am missing, please… I would love to know.

It is amazing to discover that the number one search engine isn’t the number one free web based email provider. For a flash, I thought maybe Google doesn’t want to be. I figured that the more email accounts they host the more money it costs. However, that isn’t true, because the more email accounts that are created, the more people are exposed to the Google ads, which as you know, leads to income.

Gmail is ranked 3rd according to recent comScore data, and is currently knocking AOL Mail down to 4th place. Last year there was a reported 25 million Gmail users. This year comScore data shows over 37 million compared to AOL’s 36.4 million. But with all that said, you may be wondering who is in second place and more importantly first.

MSN holds the second place title and, well… you guessed it, Yahoo! holds the number one position. With that said, does it really come to any surprise? Think about it for a moment. Consider the marketing. Yahoo! and MSN both make their email services known. And I believe they do more so than Google.

Consider for a moment the mass amount of users who haven’t taken advantage the whole iGoogle experience. Remember, if you don’t have a Google account, when you access Google.com, you’re getting nothing but a blank white page with a search bar. In my opinion, how difficult would it be to promote Gmail on the Google Homepage?

Now I understand that the homepage isn’t as bare as it once was. But, seriously… is Google really utilizing the space on their homepage to promote their services? Remember, their free services help generate income. You’d think it was in their best interest to tell people about their basic services such as Gmail, Maps, and News.

The point I make is that these results come to no surprise despite the fact that Gmail blows Yahoo! Mail and MSN Mail out of the water. Gmail is by far more advanced, more capable, and is packed with many more features compared to the others. With that said though, it comes to no surprise to me that Gmail is ranked #3 instead of #1 due to Google’s lack of marketing of their own services. What’s your opinion on the matter? Share your opinions in the comments below.