 You know, I have always wondered. With all the filters that Google seems to have that knock directories and article sites off the face of the Google map, what would it be like to place well with some of the less major, certainly not minor, search engines like Yahoo? Here is some insight. After reading an article in one of my favorite newsletters, I have decided to try to optimize for Yahoo and see what shakes out of my little black, I mean white, bag. Yahoo gets 22.1% of the search engine traffic. Google gets 64%. Seems to me like a website should be able to get some pretty decent traffic from a page one placement for a high traffic keyword phrase. Here are the basics: Title tag - The word used here is "blatantly" use the keyword phrase in the title tag. The best example of this that I use "blatantly" is in my Moxie Drive Expressions article directory. After discovering a flaw in the Article Directory Pro software, I patched the title tag so the actual title of the article, name of the author for the author page, and catagory name for the category page, would show up in the title tag. Just this one action caused my Yahoo traffic to go from a numbing zero to hundreds. I think that the title tag is the most important piece of the puzzle when it comes to optimizing for Yahoo as a result. Meta Description - I think this can be done two ways. If the description is available, I would like it to include the keywords and about 15-18 words from the first paragraph. The code to accomplish this in an Article Directory Pro article directory is still a work in progress. So, I have come up with an alternative. Don't use the description meta tag. The title, with the keywords, shows up first on the article page. This along with a "snippet" from the article, usually the first few sentences, is picked up by Yahoo, as well as the other search engines. This is fine with me because the keyword phrases show up a couple of times in the title and the first paragraph. Hey, if it looks good in the search engine why try anything else? If you do use a description meta tag, use 15-18 words. This is enough to fill out the description portion of your Yahoo search engine description. Meta Keywords - Since I use the keywords in the title, it is easier for me to pull in the article title. It is consistant with the title tag and the description. Google seems to be the only search engine that does not use the keyword meta tag, so optimizing for Yahoo would require it. It is recommended not to be over 250 characters, comma delimited and do not repeat a keyword more than 3 times. I have repeated up to 6. Keywords in URL - I have always thought that this is one of the things that you can do to push your pages past the competition. Headings - h1 and h2 tags containing the keywords. I usually make the title the h1 tag because the size of the h1 makes it show up prominently. Sometimes too prominently. Use the "small" tag to get the size under control. Alt Tags - increases the keyword density. Inline links - Improves relevance by linking out to related sites. Site structure - The best way to do this is to use what is called "Themeing". Start out by writing about a broader version of your topic and narrow it to a more specific theme. Links - In all cases, quality before quantity. Site Explorer Settings - Did you even know that Yahoo had this? Go to Yahoo's Site Explorer. You can add your website and your sitemap...what a concept. Other stuff - I keep my robots.txt open so the search engines don't think twice about indexing. I really don't care who is looking as long as they are. If I do not want a link indexed I use the rel=nofollow switch in the html. Also, I think the $299.00 inclusion fee to get into the Yahoo Directory is a waste of money. You can try it if you want, but I do not find it necessary. One really great observation that I discovered about Yahoo, unlike Google, is that fresh content does not seem to matter. Once optimized and on page one, you can stay there based on the attributes of your efforts and not have to tweak the content to stay there. Labels: SEO
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1 Comments:
Although Google is my number one search engine, I also like Yahoo as I receive a decent amount of traffic from that search engine and many of my pages rank well with their SERPs.
MSN is sad, probably to one day be eclipsed by Ask or some other not very relevant search engine.
2:55 PM
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