Yahoo shows it still has some answers !

Not much has been going well for Yahoo! of late - its stock took a severe beating with the delay of its much anticipated (and much needed) Panama -the PPC search platform, its share of the search market is going down, it's been involved in click fraud settlement suits, it is losing its hold on MySpace advertising to Google (separate post on this)...the list goes on. Of course, it changed its look recently; may be, that will turn things for the better. Mark Naples reviews what's going wrong with Yahoo and what it can do better on iMediaconnection.

But one service that seems to be doing really well is Answers. The number of users and the volume of answers (content) generated on the site is significant and it is growing pretty fast. It's gotten all kinds of people involved in asking and answering questions; Yahoo! also managed to generate quite a buzz by getting some very prominent people, including Stephen Hawking, to ask/ answer questions.

Yahoo answers is growing and we can almost feel it. Danny Sullivan has his take on the value of this service and how it can help the searcher. Towards the end of his piece he makes a very pertinent reference to Google Answers, which I thought was an excellent idea when it first launched.

Whatever's happened to Google Answers ? What plans does Google have for this service (if at all)?

Coming back to Yahoo Answers, is Yahoo optimally monetizing the user base and traffic generated? I believe not. I did see some sponsored ads floating around on some answers pages but I feel they could definitely do a lot more.

Pricing SEO Campaigns

How much should a good search engine optimization project cost? How much are companies willing to pay for SEO companies?

Get an idea here. SEO campaigns in the range of $30,000-$50,000 will certainly be out of bounds of companies in the small to medium sized business segment that acutally is a sizeable chunk of the SEO market.

But at least these prices should open the eyes of many SMBs who want to achieve the same results as the big guns for a few hundred dollars. There has to be some sense of proportion, isn't it?