Search Engine Marketing - Optimising Your Website For Yahoo!

By: MarkD McCormack
Submitted: 2007-01-17 13:47:08
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SE optimisation is a hot topic in internet marketing, so we have written a series of primers on the important factors in getting high search engine rankings. Each search engine is different and different search marketing techniques need to be used to get good rankings on them all.

Unlike Google, Yahoo places much more emphasis on links, meta tags, and text content, and less on site age. The important considerations for a high Yahoo ranking are as follows.

Links

Yahoo like Google, feels that a good search engine needs to monitor links as an important factor, because it is the least easy to manipulate. However, Yahoo is less strict than Yahoo, when it comes to evaluating the quality and the nature of links. It does not have an equivalent to page rank, although it does monitor the keywords in the anchor text. Links also seem to mature in importance on Yahoo, and they made need to be in place for several weeks before they are recognised. Yahoo has less bias towards information sites than Google, and so commercial sites can find themselves getting a higher ranking quicker and commercial links are more highly valued.

Meta tags

At the top of most web pages, there is a information for search engines that is not presented to human readers by their web browsers and these are know as meta tags. These are used by web designers and optimisers to tell search engines what the page is about. They include a page title, a page description, and a list of the keywords that relate to the content. Yahoo reads and uses these meta tags, but places less emphasis on them than it has in the past.

On page keywords

When Yahoo crawls the text on a web page, it looks to see which keywords are important. It will look to match the prominent keywords that it found in the Meta tags to see if they are also present in the readable content. Keywords should be:

Prominent – they should feature in the page headings and they should be at the beginning and the end of the page. They should be in bold or italicised text as the crawler will see this text as more important.

In Links - Keywords should be paced in or near internal and external hyperlinks because of the importance that crawlers place on them.

Used Often - How often is a point for debate and it varies with sectors. However, you can generalise by saying that the density of the keywords in your text needs to be monitored to make sure it meets and appropriate level in your sector.

Never be tempted to take short cuts to achieve Yahoo rankings as they will always cause problems in the end. Also remember that while optimisation is important, there is no substitute for new, unique content.

Mark McCormack is a twenty year B2B marketing veteran, with extensive experience of internet marketing. His business, Markmedia, offers interim management and consultancy advice in the UK. Their website is http://www.markmedia.org.uk. Mark can be contacted at mark@markmedia.org.uk.

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