SEO for Yahoo

Last time, we've talked SEO for MSN. Today, Let's take a look at Yahoo, which is considered as the second largest search engine right after Google (Which I will talk about in my next lesson).
The algorithm of Yahoo is based on Inktomi that Yahoo purchased in 2002 as part of their plan to stop serving Google results to search queries. The major ranking factor for Yahoo include:

• Keyword Density
  


• Site Structure


• Aging Delay
  


• Link Popularity

Keyword Density

As noted in the article on MSN, it would be unwise to specify a keyword density for you to target on your website. You may want to use some SEO tools to find out about an average value of keyword density for the sites ranked in the top 10 places in Yahoo. As far as I am concerned, to rank well on Yahoo, you should have a relatively higher keyowrd desity than the situation you want to optimize for Google. But again, keep in mind, always put your audience in the first place, don't just put keyword there to increase the density where it does not make any sense to your audience.


Site Structure
On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo! While having a good site structure is important for a vaiety of reasons, it was on Yahoo!

The site structure is important for two key reasons. First, the site structure determines the order in which your page content gets seen by Yahoo and hence, content that occurs higher up in the code of your page (not necessarily in your browser) is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code. Second, a properly structured site will be lower in code through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use, etc. The reduction in code will push the content higher up the page as far as a search engine is concerned and thus, it will be given more weight.


Aging Delay
Many focus on Google's "sandbox" when they think of aging delays however Yahoo! employs one as well, though it is lighter and lasts a shorter duration of time. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for a while. New sites can expect to find it extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of 6 months. You can look at my site as an example. As I mentioned in my previous lesson, my targeted keyword "platform bed" get ranked 3rd on MSN while nowhere to be found on Yahoo.

Link Popularity
Of the 3 search engines, Google consider backlinks as one of the most important factors when place your site for organic search; thus, I will leave this factor in my next lesson.

SEO for MSN

Well, Let's hear some good news. I found that my site www.bestplatformbeds.com get ranked pretty well on MSN for the major keywords I was targeting - "platform bed" and "platform beds". But when I did a search on Yahoo and Google, It ranked probably somewhere around 150. So what is all the fuss about? Let's see explorer how these 3 search engines determine the ranking a site and the differences of the algorithm. (Based on my observation and my search)

MSN:
On site:

• the quality of content
  

• the internal linking structure of the site (how the pages of your site are linked together)

• the number of pages in your site and the relevancy of those pages to your main topic and phrases

• Title, headings and meta tags
  
• keyword density
  

The quality of the content referring to the attractiveness of your content both to search engines and your audiences. If you content is unique, of great value to your audiences (attractive to your audience), have at least 200 words, and have your targeted keywords stressed(attractive to search engine), then you are in good shape.

The internal linking structure referring to how the pages of your site are linked together. For example, if I have a page that is targeting "platform bed store", then I need to use this text link in most of my pages and make it "visible" to the search engine. If any of those pages have good Page rank, then it adds value to my "platform bed store" page.

For MSN, Title, headings and meta tags hold a very high level of weight in the algorithm. The proper use of your page title, H1 and H2 headings and meta descriptions (most search engines today ignore meta keywords) can get you a good spot on MSN if you also managed your off page factor well.

Off page:

With MSN, the off site factors are much simpler to deal with than either Google or Yahoo! If you do a link search for all the three search engines, you will probably find that MSN count the most links for you. For my platform beds site, MSN count 29 back links, Yahoo count 10 while Google say I don't have any back links pointing to my site.

Since offpage factor weights more in Yahoo and Google, I will devel into this topic in my next lesson when I talk about Yahoo and Google.

SEO Vs Usability - All about Content

In the old days, we've learned all the tricks for SEO, such as include keyword in your h1 or h2, bold, italic your keyowrd, have a proper keyword density on your page. But, have you ever thought that what if some of the things you do does not make too much sense to your audiances? In that case, do you still want to keep them to make search engine happy? In my opinion, content should be created that is intented to make your audiance happy, not search engines. Keep in mind, if your audiance like it, finally search engine will like it too!

Quite simply, search engines love content - the more content there is on a page the easier it is for search engines to work out what the page is actually about. Usually, you may think of having a content that is no less than 200 words. Search engines may have problems to find out the point of a web page with less than 200 words, and ultimately penalising that page in the search rankings. In my website, http://www.bestplatformbeds.com On most of my pages, I have content created that explains clearly and concisly to our audiance what is this page about and what value / information can they get in the this page. In addition, take the file size into account, becasue you don't want your visitors to wait for 20 secs for downloading your page.

SEO-lesson: Should I Change My URL?

Yesterday, I just came across an article talking about optimizing onpage factors. One of the factors the article mentioned about is the way naming your URL. When I created my site 2 months ago, for consistence, i used all underscores for my subpages; for example, for my platform bed store page, i named it bestplatformbeds.com/platform_bed_store.php But according to that article, hypen is better than underscore becasue most search engines treat hypen as space, so to search engine, a hypen will be like "platform bed store". Unless you are targeting the keyword "platform_bed_store" then it is better to use underscore in your url.
Just when I want to change my URL and use 301 redirect for my pages, I got some other advice from the forum that changing URLs should only, only, only be done for a really, really, really good reason and in my case it will be like SEO suicide. URL has a minimum effect on your ranking, if any at all! Just want to share with whoever considering change the URL without a very very very good reason.