I received the following letter from Yahoo! Search Marketing yesterday indicating they are making some changes to their interface, specifically the way ads are shown in the search results:

Dear Advertiser,

A new look is coming to the Yahoo! search results pages that will translate into more clicks for your listings. On January 18th, Yahoo! will debut a streamlined design that will make the search results displayed on Yahoo! even easier for consumers to read. Our research has shown that by improving the search experience in this way, advertisers can generally expect to see an increase in clicks, while maintaining their conversion rates.

How this change impacts your listings:

• Yahoo! will display shorter descriptions for Sponsored
  Search listings
• You don’t have to make any changes to your listings; they’ll
  be automatically shortened for you when displayed on Yahoo!
• If you’d like to optimize your listings for Yahoo!, begin
  your description with one short sentence that includes your
  keyword and focuses on your most important information in
  the first 70 characters
• Over time, we will fine tune the exact character count that
  we believe works best for advertisers and search users
• Most of our partners, including MSN, CNN, ESPN and Infospace,
  will still display longer descriptions for your Sponsored
  Search listings, though the exact length may vary from
  partner to partner

Yahoo! is taking this step to improve the search experience for its users. By continuously focusing on delivering highly relevant search results in a user-friendly format, Yahoo!
also gives you the best possible platform for reaching customers interested in what your business provides.

Sincerely,

Your Partners at Yahoo! Search Marketing

Barry has posted several entries from the Search Engine Strategies 2005 Conference in Chicago. A summary of the conference can be read on his website.

It’s not really SEM marketing news but some of you may be interested in checking these out ;-)

Please welcome some friends and colleagues on the launch of their new sites recently!

• Mario the Montreal Dog Walker! Mario walks and boards dogs on Nun’s Island in Montreal. His wife is expecting another addition to their household this week - but it’s a 2 legged baby instead of a 4 legged baby! I left my dogs with Mario for a week while I was out of town and when I returned my dogs were better behaved than ever LOL
• On the subject of dogs, say hello to Romy and Jacob while you search for a new designer dog coat for your pooch! These coats are far from the average knit sweaters that average dogs wear…These are designer style! Corduroy, paisley, faux fur - you name it!
• I thought I knew all about VOIP but when I received a call from MyFon…I soon realized I knew very little! It’s hard enough keeping up with the SEM market, but now I have to keep up with the VOIP telephone market as well!

I will follow up with the review of ranking software that I promised but today is a busy one!