Ballmer wants Yahoo! because then he can charge more for advertisement.  In his words “We’d have higher monetization levels possible in front of us because there would be more people bidding on more key words.”

Ballmer also stated that Microsoft is fully prepared to compete for search without the acquisition of Yahoo!  and that they’re ready to put 5 – 10% of operating income into their online business in order to make themselves competitive.

Will that be enough?  Probably not. You can bet that Google is putting a lot more than 5 – 10% of its operating budget into its nearly 100% online business.  I

In the end Microsoft grabbing Yahoo! may be temporarily good for Yahoo’s shareholders and its own bottom line, but with Ballmer’s attitude it’s seems likely that the idea of a merged Microsoft and Yahoo! may simply lead to the ultimate domination of search by one Goliath Google, and that won’t be good for anyone but Google and its shareholders.

So lets examine that assumption and see where it goes wrong. First of all here is what Google says about Depth of Visit. It “is a measure of visit quality. A large number of high pageviews per visit suggest that visitors interact extensively with your site. ” Obviously if an in depth visit is a good thing than bouncing is a bag thing, or is it.

Bounce Rate: One thing that this could indicate is that your visitors aren’t finding what they want (this is Google’s assumption) and here is where it makes sense. If you’re site is an e-commerce site and someone lands on a product page and leaves before visiting your shopping cart page, that is pretty clearly a negative for you and maybe for the visitor who didn’t find what they wanted. However if you are providing information, such as what is necessary to qualify for a tax exemption in an enterprise zone, and a person comes to your page is able to determine that she doesn’t qualify and leaves your site, your site may have done exactly the job needed and the person may be a satisfied user. This happens all the time on information sites.

What to do? Well you could break up your content so that visitors only get half of what they need before they are forced to click page 2. We see this a lot on news sites, though there the reason is to force you to read more ads. No, far better is to make sure that all your other search engine optimization is done well, so that this doesn’t become the overriding factor in how Google ranks your site.

At the same time, Google should check its assumptions which  may be based too much on the commercial side of the Internet.

If you wan to see what a search engine sees when it looks at your web site, use a free tool  like SearchEngineText.com. Put your url in and it will render a search engine view of your site.  You may be surprised at what you see.  And, if you don’t see plenty of the words you think your page is about then you will want to go back and rewrite your copy for that page.

If you wanted to get a good idea of the problem you face getting found in cyberspace you might try getting away from the city and looking up at the sky on a clear night. From any one place you are able to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 2,500 stars. Another 2,500 to 5,000 stars are actually visible in the Milky Way, but that is only a tiny fraction of the 100 billion stars the galaxy holds. When you search the Internet you typically see a results page for 10 results of the more than 20 billion documents that are out there.

If you have ever tried to pick out the North Star you can imagine that it would be nearly impossible without the big dipper. Luckily drawing a line between the two “pointer” stars at the front of the Big Dipper leads you to the North Star.

The job that search engines perform is similar to the guidance that the pointer stars offer. They get you in the vicinity of what you are looking for. Actually, the pointer stars probably do a slightly better job than search engines are able to. It would be nice if search engines could find you exactly the information you are looking for and put that document in the number one position and then give you all the rest of the documents like that in descending order, but they can’t.

Consider a searcher who enters the search term (keyword) mustang. What is this person searching for? Google appears to think it is more likely than not that they are searching for something to do with the vehicle Ford makes. On the day this was written there was also one result for motorcycle seats and one for survival suits in the top ten results. Sorry, if you were doing research on horses or looking for the town of Mustang Oklahoma you’ll have to refine your search, dig deeper or try another search engine.

The good news is you don’t need to know the inner workings of search engines or be mathematician or even an engineer to show up at the top of their search results where 85% of all Internet users turn for the information they seek from the Web.

Reading this blog and following the advice in it can’t guarantee that you will show up for a given keyword term, but it will certainly increase your chances. I’d suggesting using the categories as a guide for your explorations here. And remember you can always drop me a line.