It must been have a humbling experience for Microsoft to admit defeat with its decision to takeover Yahoo! as its last-gasp attempt to remain relevant. As we SEO's know, relevancy is the key to suucess in the search engine marketing arena, and Microsoft has been anything but for several years. (And I'll save my comments about Windows Vista for another day.)

So, what does this mean for marketers who rely on organic rankings through optimization and/or Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertsing to generate web traffic? In the short run, not much. In the long run, probably not much either except for a possible slight decrease in rates as competition heats up.
 
Though this planned merger makes for good headlines and commentary, the bottom line for marketers is that success on the search engines has always been based on the basic principles of good old Marketing 101: get the right message to the right person at the right time and place. That won't change, no matter who owns what search engine or what percentage of search traffic uses Google or any of its competitors.

The combined Microsoft/Yahoo! search engine platform may prove to be a more formidable competitor than they've been recently as separate entities, which may reduce the cost of advertising, but regardless of where or how much you spend on your SEO, PPC, and other online advertising campaigns, you still need to focus on the tried and true aspects of successful marketing.

I'm not going to spend too much time focused on the analysis of pundits about the back-room politics and finances of this proposed merger, but instead I will keep my eye on the changes that Google will start to make as a result, because those will have a bigger impact on my clients' success until the merger dust settles and becomes a permanent part of the search engine landscape.