What’s behind a high bounce rate?
Users “bounce”—that is, click away and say goodbye to your website—when they find your homepage less than interesting. Search Marketing Standard’s Rebecca Appleton gives four reasons why users bounce and tells you what you can do about it. She’s also kind enough to offer tips on how to optimize your landing page for PPC. All that for free. There’s a reason we like her.

Tweet all about it!
Unless you live in L.A. or have an expense account fat enough for your company to fly you there, you’re probably missing the 140 Character Conference (#140), yesterday and today. Well, never fear, Twitter is here. Follow the Tweets by conference-goers, including our own Jeff Sweat. Good stuff for the aspiring publisher to know.

Viral marketing…with Bunnies!
Publishers are always looking for little ways to get big returns. Here’s a quick case study on how to make your viral marketing breed like rabbits: At the recent premier of “Rabbit Fever,” a funny documentary about competitive bunny breeders, the producers gave out bunny ears to everyone in the theater, and took photos. Then they put the photos on Flickr, knowing that everyone in the audience on Facebook or Twitter or with a blog would post about it (like we are right now). Talk about cheap, effective viral marketing. (Full disclosure: The author of this post was in that audience. See if you can find him in his rabbit ears on Flickr.)

Oh, the stories they could tell
Over at Search Engine Land, Ciarán Norris talks about the best (and worst) stories that brands have told via social media. Some solid do’s and do-not’s from history.

Dialing for yodels
OK, most phones don’t actually “ring” anymore. They chirp, ping, buzz, vibrate, and sing “Crazy Train” or just about any other song. But now you can get your phone to actually yodel. Not only that, you can make it yodel in just about any style you want: hip-hop, a cappella, R&B, reggae, bluegrass, what-have-you. To get your own yodel and for info on other Yahoo! innovations this week, click over to Yodel Anecdotal.

And End-of-Year Tribute

This month marks the 60th anniversary of the transistor. Invented at New Jersey’s Bell Labs in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley, the transistor is essentially an electric on/off switch without any moving parts. It is the fundamental building block of the microprocessors now making this conversation possible. Without the transistor, we would likely never have put men on the moon, built a lightweight and affordable electronic calculator, played Pong, developed mobile telephony, or created the Internet.

The original transistors were large, balky things that gave off incredible heat and burnt out every few days. Today’s transistors are solid state, and as many as one billon of them can fit onto a single microprocessor smaller than your fingernail. In fact, each of these modern marvels has thousands of times more computing power than the computers on board the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

Most salient to the readers of this blog, the transistor has allowed virtually anyone with a computer and an idea to publish and have their thoughts and be heard as never before.

The ’Net’s Founding Fathers
It has been said that we are all dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. Well, we’d like to take this opportunity for an end-of-year salute to some of the giants who have helped bring this new world to life:

Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type printing press (1455) made possible more rapid transmission of information and ideas.

Blaise Pascal’s adding machine (1642) inspired future computing devices.

J.M. Jacquard’s loom (1800) was controlled by punch cards that made it possible to weave complex patterns. An early form of data storage, these punch cards set the stage for the punch-card computing of the mid-20th century. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate!

Charles Babbage’s “difference engine” (1835) was a mechanical computer. Although it didn’t go very far, it inspired future efforts. Babbage’s assistant, Ada Lovelace, is credited with documenting the first software programs or “routines.”

Christopher Shole’s typewriter (1868) gave us the odd-ball “QWERTY” keyboard that persists to this day. Now you know who to blame.

John Fleming’s vacuum tube (1905) made possible radio, TV and computers.

Vannevar Bush’s mechanical “differential analyzer” (1930) was an analog computer. He also theorized the memex, a proto-hypertext computer system, and pushed for more technology funding.

John Eckert and John Mauchly’s ENIAC computer boasted 20,000 vacuum tubes. It was said that the lights in Philly dimmed when it was switched on. Later, the duo invented the first commercial computer, the UNIVAC, which could pick winners in political races based on raw data.

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and Wiliam Shockley’s transistor (1947) rendered the vacuum tube obsolete in one fell swoop.

Douglas Engelbart’s computer “mouse” (1964-8) and “windows” will one day make computing much easier, and made Steve Jobs and Bill Gates rich beyond their wildest dreams of avarice. Engelbart also invented an early hypertext system, among other innovations. 

Charley Kline and Leonard Kleinrock’s first data transmissions from UCLA over ARPANET (1969) laid the foundations for the Internet.

Robert Metcalf’s Ethernet (1973) made connected computing a breeze.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (1989) and changed the world forever.

Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina’s Mosaic web browser (1993) let people surf the Web with ease.

Jerry Yang and David Filo’s Yahoo! (1994) started out as two guys cataloguing websites in a trailer on Stanford campus. The rest is, as they say, history.

And, lastly, let’s not forget You, the pioneering publisher who is creating cutting-edge, multimedia content for the wide audience on the Web.

Salut!

—The Team

Kids’ Crooked House Visits the Burbank Campus

On the surface, it seems so simple. After all, it’s just a nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man,
Who walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.

It’s when you start to think about what that word “stile” means that it gets interesting. Just what is a stile, anyway? A turnstile, of course, is one of those one-way revolving gates that lets people in or out, but not out or in, respectively.

A stile, it turns out, is a border, and the border in the rhyme is the one between Scotland and England. And the crooked house? That’s an allegory, too. It refers to the newly cobbled-together United Kingdom presided over by the doomed King Charles I in the 17th Century.

But we’re not going to let all that weighty knowledge spoil our fun at hosting a genuine, Yahoo! branded, Kids’ Crooked House, right here at on Burbank campus. In fact, this knowledge only adds to the good times.

This wonky little playhouse was built especially for Yahoo! by Glenn Halliday, owner of KidsCrookedHouse.com and one of the winners of our Ultimate Connection contest. If there’s a 90-degree angle in this miniature villa, our little friends here couldn’t find it. It’s been great having it around, and the big Yahoos love it almost as much as the little ones. It’s been a lesson in geometry, poetry, history and fun.

Thanks, Glen, and again, congrats.

—The Team

The CNET blog, Webware, just announced that 11 Yahoo! apps and services made the finalist list for its Webware 100 Awards, out of almost 2,000 nominations. The 100 winners—the ten best in ten different categories—will be chosen by popular vote. Voting began today at noon, Pacific Time and will close June 11 at 9:00 a.m.

The Yahoo! finalists are:

Bix
del.icio.us
Flickr
Jumpcut
MyBlogLog
My Yahoo!
Yahoo! Pipes
Upcoming
Widgets
Yahoo! Maps
Yahoo! Search

To vote for (or against) any of these Yahoo! apps, click on the app name. Keep in mind that some Yahoo! apps are actually competing with others in the same categories, so pick your favorites carefully!

—The Team

OK, we admit it: We’d make a bad husband. Our anniversary slipped passed and we didn’t even notice.

Our first posts on the Yahoo! Publisher Network Blog went up on April 10, 2006. Wow. It’s been a heck of a year, and then some.

This blog has been all over the publishing map as we’ve striven to become a valuable, trusted resource for publishers both in and out of our network. Since we started, our readership has more than doubled.

We’ve written about:

• How-to’s, including: Optimizing for Relevancy, Driving Traffic with Linkbait and avoiding Blogging Faux Pas.
• Guest Columns by smart people in the Web biz like JZ, Daron Babin and Barry Schwartz.
• Optimization Tips like your ad display preferences, choosing clickable colors and ad placement tips.

And so much more—more than 260 posts in all. For a complete list, check out the Archives page.

Thanks so much for making this a really great year.

—Michael Mattis and the entire Yahoo! Publisher Network Team

Editor’s Note: Since September of last year, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is part of a continuing series by Senior Insight Manager Todd Lombardo in which he will share your opinions and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher. In Part 1 of this post, we talked about what you told us regarding your plans for 2007.  Since a majority of you told us you are focusing on driving traffic, we followed up to ask you specifically about that.

How do you plan to drive traffic to your site(s) in 2007?

A third of you are focusing on SEO to improve your organic performance, and a quarter are getting your links out there one way or another. 

We had a lot of free-form responses on this one, including:

“Internally built member programs.”
“E-zines.”
“Create new sections.”
“Traffic trading agreements.”
“Partnership with Fortune 500’s.”
“Provide free services.”
“B2B.”
“Content Development from a better understanding of our readers desires from users comments, suggestions, and log file analysis.”
 “All of the above.”

Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager, recommends following a methodical process when focusing on driving traffic to your sites:

1. Stay up to date on SEO best practices, such as those discussed on Search Engine Roundtable, Search Engine Watch Blog, SEO Book, SEOMoz, Stuntdubl and Jensense.   Check out the forums at WebmasterWorld and Digital Point. And let the community be your guide.  You can check out popular items tagged “SEO” on del.icio.us, and you can subscribe to the RSS feed as well.

2. Get out in your (online) community.  Nothing beats a new reader discovering your site after seeing your MyBlogLog profile on a site of similar interest. And, MyBlogLog also has an analytics package that shows you “Where Readers Came From” (how people found your site) and “What Readers Clicked” (how people left your site). These can help you with future content development decisions.

3. If you follow the SEO advice of blogs, and you rearrange your content according to user patterns, make sure that you check, check, and re-check your search engine ranking to see what changes are having a positive vs. negative effect. Yahoo’s Site Explorer  is one way to see indexed pages, in-links and popularity rankings.

4. If you blog, there are a number of plugins to WordPress and MovableType that make it easy to make your site more discoverable.  You can automatically add related articles from your archive to your current article, quickly organize tags, or build a sitemap.  Graywolf, offers a list of top SEO-related WordPress plugins, and WebProNews has a list of MovableType plugins.  We’ll have more on this topic in a future post.

We will continue to ask you questions and share the results to hear what you have to say, and to help you improve your publishing experience.  Please let us know what you’d like to learn more about in a future poll! 

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insights Manager

A St. Patrick’s Day Cheat Sheet

St. Patrick’s Day is perhaps the biggest unofficial holiday in the U.S. this side of Halloween. Yesterday, Yahoos in Burbank celebrated with Irish music, potato skins, beer, soft drinks and, of course, a bit o’ the gab.

The following fun facts about St. Patrick’s Day were gleaned using Yahoo! Search in about 10 minutes:

• The Irish Gaelic phrase, Erin go Bragh, literally translates to “Ireland until the Day of Judgment,” which is a cheeky way of saying what almost every culture says now and then: “We’re number one”
• St. Patrick’s Day is a national holiday in Ireland
• Despite St. Patrick’s best efforts, there are still a few snakes in Ireland, but most of them, as in other places, are in politics
• Slainte! is Irish Gaelic for “cheers!” and is pronounced “Slan-jah”
• The first St. Patrick’s Day Parade in the Americas was held in New York City in 1766, though the first observances took place in Boston
• Today, some 150,000 marchers take part in the New York City parade
• Irish tartans tend to go by district, unlike Scottish tartans, which are usually tied to a family surname or clan
• About 34 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and the Irish diaspora worldwide is said to comprise some 80 million people
• The population of Ireland in 2006 was just under 6 million

Yahoo! wishes everyone a happy and safe St. Patrick’s Day weekend.

Slainte!

—The Team

“Congratulations on prospering in money”

That’s how the traditional Chinese New Year’s greeting—gung hay fat choy—literally translates. A more nuanced translation might be, “Best wishes and congratulations. Have a prosperous and good year.”

Today is the first day of the Chinese New Year, which marks the end of winter and the beginning of spring. During the 15-day celebration, called the “Lantern Festival”:

• Scrolls are displayed on walls and doorways with messages of good health and luck, long life, prosperity and happiness.
• Firecrackers crackle in the streets to ward off wicked spirits.
• Red packets, known as lai see in Cantonese, and containing money in even denominations, are passed out to unmarried young people.
• Ancestors are honored and gods are thanked for their blessings.
• Homes are filled with flowers and fruit, symbolizing good luck and joy.
• Blossoms, symbolizing longevity and courage, are arranged.

China by the Numbers
The following eight metrics on China and the Chinese people were compiled in eight minutes using Yahoo! Search.

8—The number associated with sudden fortune and prosperity
16.5—Average hours Chinese Internet users spent online as of July 2006
778,400—The number of Chinese websites as of July 2006 (up from 110,000 in 2005)
60 million—Number of people of Chinese origin or descent not living in China
123 million—Number of Chinese Internet users as of July 2006
1.1 billion—Number of dollars spent online in 2005 by Chinese residents
1.3 billion—Number of people in China, 2006
10 trillion—Gross domestic product (purchasing power parity) of China in dollars

We at Yahoo! have to admit to a marked affinity with prosperity and big, lucky numbers—for our advertisers, our publishers, our users and, yes, ourselves. And we also like the idea of a 15-day party. We’d like to wish everyone in 4704, the Year of the Boar, a big gung hay fat choy!

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

No, we don’t mean “go to the gym more often,” “lose weight,” “quit drinking coffee” or any of those physical impossibilities. We mean, what are your publishing New Year’s resolutions?

We want to know because we’d like to help you meet your goals—if you’re successful, we’re successful. Here are a few topic ideas to get you thinking, and some links to a few pointers that we’ve published since the blog launch last April:

To Better Engage Users
Getting users to interact with your content, and not just look at it, is a way to help keep them hooked. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past year, and have pointed the way to new Yahoo! APIs, mash-ups, widgets and badges from del.icio.us, Answers, Photos, Flickr, Maps and Upcoming.org, as well as Finance. Do these kinds of social media tools capture your fancy?

To Build Higher Traffic
More traffic, especially more of the right traffic, can often lead to more qualified clicks. On the blog, we’re currently in the middle of a series on guerilla marketing techniques to help you build your traffic. We posted the first of these articles in December. Be on the lookout for a lot more to come in 2007.

To Optimize My Ad Units
Should I put my ad units on the top or on the side? How many should I have on each page? What’s the most effective color? We’ve dealt with some of these questions before. Recently, we shared our research findings into how you optimize ad configuration and categories, and offered insight into improvement. Last spring we gave tips on ad placement and color matching. You’ll be seeing a lot more of this in future.

To Develop More Intriguing Content
Content is king. After all, what else do you want people talk about when they get to your site but your content? Creating good content is hard. But there are options. We’ve blogged about how you can use Creative Commons—the non-profit group that offers flexible-copyright content [what does flexible-copyright content mean?]—to ad “cred” to your site with authoritative content and share your own expertise with the world. Meanwhile, Jeremy Zowadny has elaborated on the Zen of blogging, and we’ve pointed you to a good source to help keep your site free of jargon. 

To Create a Better-looking Site
If there’s one thing famed blogstress Jen Slegg can’t stand, it’s an ugly website. Neither can I, I might add. To help turn publishers into aesthetes, we’ve been running a series on how to achieve good design. So far we’ve covered designing for the Web 2.0 style, leveraging research to design for your users, and on using patterns and pattern libraries to keep your look and feel consistent.

To Get Higher in Search Rankings
Everyone wants to get on top—especially on top of search rankings. We’ve blogged both about pay-as-you-go techniques, as well as SEM for everyone. Beginning next week, we’ll be running a series on optimizing your pages for search. Be sure to look for it.

Our New Year’s resolution here at Yahoo? To help do more good. Recently, Yahoo! for Good, in association with Network for Good launched Charity Badges. These customizable badges allow your users to donate to the charity or charities of your choice, right from your website. In addition, Yahoo! is giving a matching gift of up to $50,000 to the charity promoted by the top-performing Charity Badge.

We think that’s a resolution for good.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor and the Team

• “Christmas” was the number one search on Yahoo! on Friday, Dec. 22. 2006.
  “God Jul!” is Norwegian for “Merry Christmas!”; in Finland they say “Hyvää Joulua!”, and in Ukraine, “Srozhdestvom Kristovym!”
• British leader Oliver Cromwell cancelled Christmas in 1645. No kidding.
• During the 1820s, Christmas Eve, not New Year’s Eve, was the big party night, sometimes ending in riots.
• More than 38 million households tuned into the movie, “A Christmas Story” during one Christmas Eve television marathon.
• The real-life Saint Nicholas lived in what is now Turkey, a long, long way from the North Pole.
• The first Christmas tree with electric lights was displayed December 22, 1882, by an Edison Electric Light Company VP.
• David Sedaris’ “SantaLand Diaries” first aired on National Public Radio in 1992.
• Twenty-eight oxen and 300 sheep: That’s what King Richard II of England’s guests ate at his Christmas feast in 1377.
• It takes 7 to 10 years to grow the average Christmas tree.
• Santa Claus is also known as: Father Christmas, Father Frost, Joulupukki, Kris Kringle, Saint Basil, Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas and Weihnachtsmann… St. Basil?

Whatever your holiday traditions, all of us here at Yahoo! Publisher Network wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.

—The Team