End of an Era as Semel Exits Yahoo!
By Jim Hedger (c) 2007
Tuesday June 19, 2007
Originally published in SiteProNews.com
Semel's out, Yang is in, and Decker remains firmly on deck.
Terry Semel handed his resignation to the Yahoo! Board of Directors yesterday after spending six years at the helm of the twelve year old search portal. Co-Founder Jerry Yang was quickly appointed as the new CEO with Susan Decker moving into the president's seat. Semel will continue to sit as a non-executive Chairman of the Board and as an advisor to the new the new management team.
Semel oversaw Yahoo!'s fortunes since 2001, leading Yahoo! through a phenomenal period of expansion and acquisition, including the purchases of PPC pioneer Overture and the social photo sharing network Flickr. Semel has also held the helm in Yahoo!'s fight against the Google juggernaut, a competition that tied his tenure to a sense of corporate failure.
In an open letter to Semel, Yahoo! Board Member Ed Kozel noted that under Semel, Yahoo! had actually seen several successes that in any other company in any other industry would be considered to be tremendous gains. Revenues have increased nine-fold from the operating loss Yahoo! faced in 2001 to the $1Billion in income realized last year. Yahoo!'s user base has quadrupled from 170million to over 500million in 2006, as has the size of Yahoo!'s staff from 3,500 to about 12,000.
Video is already one of the most powerful resources available to help web publishers create their content. If you have never tried to use videos to enhance your website, you certainly should consider it seriously now. People naturally prefer and trust video content more so than text or even audio. Because of this it allows publishers to more easily establish a relationship with potential customers. Videos can also help your website perform much better in the search engine rankings while complementing your existing content, making it an irresistible offer for both you and your visitors.
One of the most important facts to remember when adding videos is to ensure that they complement the overall tone of your site. Most viewers are turned off by the idea of having to download and install additional software before they can view videos on a site. This can leave their desktop cluttered with otherwise useless icons of software that they may never need again, not to mention the time that they wasted in downloading it. Websites that require this can lose what may have been valuable repeat visitors.
I think Google is on to me - how can one person be allowed to download pictures of Jessica Simpson while simultaneously performing searches in different browser windows for "data recovery" or "New Haven lasik eye surgeon"? It's pure genius, and true, you can do lots of neat things with Google, but can or even should a search engine optimization company guarantee you listings within the world's most popular search engine. Let's make sure we are all on the same page, first by getting some basic definitions and assumptions out of the way.
Guarantees can imply vastly different semantics depending on what context you are using. A real estate transaction or a debt obligation is one thing - in this article we are only concerned with guarantees as they relate to Search Engines, specifically Google - and organic search engine rankings at that. We'll be clearing our minds of PPC, banner advertising, or any other form of online marketing as they are not the direct focus of this discussion.
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