How To Optimize!!! Yahoo Optimization

Before the arrival of Google, Yahoo! was the most popular search engine. When Google arrived, Yahoo had to face tough competition. Google brought with itself indisputably precise search results thereby occupying the leading position and making it the preferred search engine among the web-surfers. However, it is estimated that about 20-25 per cent of searches are conducted on Yahoo! Another major player on the market is MSN, which means that SEO professionals cannot afford to optimize only for Google but need to take into account the details of the other two engines (Yahoo! and MSN) as well.

 SEO experts need to focus on Yahoo search engine optimization for capturing the 20-25 per cent of the market share in terms of the searches conducted on Yahoo.

Optimizing for three search engines simultaneously is not an easy task. Initially, the SEO community believed that the algorithm of Yahoo! was on deliberately just the opposite of the Google algorithm because pages that ranked high in Google did not do so well in Yahoo! and vice versa.

For Yahoo search engine optimization, the basic approach remains the same. Like all search engines, Yahoo! too spiders the pages on the Web, indexes them in its database and later performs various mathematical operations to produce the pages with the search results. Yahoo! Slurp is the second most active spider crawler on the mesh. Just like other bots, Yahoo! Slurp will be able to find your web page only if the important elements of the SEO mix are present to take your web page to the top position. You can use the Search Engine Spider Simulator to check if your pages are spiderable.

You can use several techniques to optimize your website for Yahoo and improve your Yahoo search engine results. Currently Yahoo is using the Open Directory Project, or DMOZ, and Inktomi's base for ranking web pages. Open Directory Project is a large community of volunteer website editors on the Internet. Yahoo uses the relevancy of the title, description and category meta data from your web pages to determine whether to show your website in the search results. Yahoo also uses some of the technologies that it developed for determining which website to include in the search results.

Many of the optimization techniques that are used with other search engines are used with Yahoo too. The main and the most important thing to do to optimize your website for Yahoo is to focus on keywords, title tags and meta tags for your web pages. 

Selecting the right keywords and key phrases for your web pages is very important. Make sure the keywords you selected represent the content of your web page. Go through the content of your web pages and make sure that you have the right keyword density for each page. Do not, however, overuse you keywords. The content of the web page should remain meaningful after the keyword density optimization process is completed.

You also need to include the keywords that you selected for the web page in the title tag and in the description that you will use in the meta tags. Yahoo checks your meta tags during the process of determining the relevancy of your web page. However, you need to vary your title, description and meta tags for each individual page. Optimize your meta tags on all secondary pages in addition to the home page. 

An addition to all the techniques described above, you need to make each one of you web pages useful to the visitor by providing helpful and important content. Don’t just create the web pages that include garbage as it will not help you and can even hurt you. Each of your web pages should also be user-friendly and easy to use and navigate.