Good news today for those of you who’d like to research what keywords to optimize your website for. The industry’s most popular keyword research tool, Wordtracker, is now offering a free version of their service.

Get started here.

[via SEOBook]

Some important news for Yahoo advertisers. Beginning February 5, the ranking / position of your ads will no longer be based solely on your bid amount. Instead, they’ll be ranked by both bid amount and ad quality, similar to the way Google does things.

This change, which will impact all advertisers, is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding and more on the quality of your ads. By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and reduced cost for your ads.

An ad’s quality will be determined by:

- Its historical performance—the ad’s click-through rate relative to its position in search results
- Its expected performance—determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time

More information here.