SEO for Yahoo

Ranking for yahoo is one of the most difficult among all the big three search engines, mostly for the reason of yahoo being very passive. In the process of avoiding spam, yahoo results looks to be way outdated and lacks fresh content and you can easily see this by searching yahoo for various current long tail keywords.

So the question is, what works for yahoo? for me its very hard to comment on yahoo convincingly as it has been very slow to everything on what I have tried and its hard to say anything conclusively about what really works for yahoo but still here are some of the tips which are well known about Yahoo in webmaster circles and people agree on them as far as SEO for yahoo is concerned.

6 SEO Tips For Yahoo

0. Just like Google, yahoo too has its own webmaster guidelines(?) for webmasters on what they think is good and what not. You can read it here. The page don’t have lot of information but you can get the yahoo re-inclusion request form link there, so if you think you got booted out from yahoo and now have removed those things, you can file for a re-inclusion request here. We wish, yahoo had put more information on the page, specially the things on which yahoo search engine frowns upon.

1. For Yahoo, On page SEO matters more then Google – This is a very commonly known among webmaster circles that yahoo gives more weight to on page elements than Google, so you may like to get all your on page SEO elements well tuned for yahoo, specially keyword density. Now this is a double edged sword because if you over optimizes your site, it may trigger some spam filters of Google. People do report that higher keyword density do works like charm in yahoo as well as Meta keywords which are totally useless in Google.

2. Getting into yahoo directory should also help you in getting ranked better in yahoo though I do know people who haven’t got any boost at all in yahoo. For me its always hard to comment on yahoo directory as I have heard people saying all kind of things about it. Anyway as I always say, if you have the money then probably its worth getting into yahoo directory.

3. Linking Structure of the site - Yahoo seems to give weightage to linking structure of the site. So if you Use keyword phrases in the text of your internal links, you should get some benefit from it. For example. if you see the Menu of the Home page of our site, you can see a top menu with Home | About Me url’s. Now if we make it SEO Home or as better example “Eye Cleaner Home” (for site eye-cleaner.com) will help the page rank well in yahoo for the phrase Eye Cleaner.

4. Age of the site and age of the content - Well yahoo do give lot of weight to old sites and old content and really you can’t do much about it. You can always try to build more backlinks but if there are sites which are very old with established content on your keywords, you may face serious uphill task. May be this is where this factor also comes into picture.

5. Perfect matching of Keywords - Yahoo unlike Google prefers perfect matching of keywords. For example, if your enter Plural form of a popular phrase, say keywords then Google will most likely give results with “keyword” as it do partial matching very well but yahoo will show results with “keywords” in it. You can quickly check this for, I entered “mortgages” in both google and yahoo and as predicted, google results are filled with mortgage and yahoo result with mortgages. Ofcourse this was a quick and dirty example but if you dig more into yahoo results and compare them with google, you can get more understanding of this perfect matching of yahoo. So 1 title, 1 URL works really well for yahoo as compared to google where you can fit multiple titles into 1 url.

6. Backlinks and other SEO stuff - The reason why so little documentation is available on SEO for Yahoo or SEO for MSN (I am writing an article on it too) is that most of the things are fairly common for all the search engines. You need quality content and quality backlinks to start with and its not that easy to get them as people think and its always advisable to spend 90% time and effort on these two factors only (ofcourse it don’t apply to ecommerce and similar type of sites).

7. Use RSS Feeds - Yahoo is big on RSS feeds and if you don’t have a feed on your site, then you should get one. Its fairly simple to create a feed nowdays and most of the CMS’s already offer it or you can use a feed generator. Cnce the feed is created, login to your my yahoo and add the feed there. This was suggest to me by Ahmed aka SultanofSEO Thanks

I think this pretty much summarizes Search Engine Optimization tips for yahoo, If you know something or don’t agree with what I have stated here, please post your comments and views in comment box below. I would love to hear what people think about yahoo search engine.

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Other Related posts:

1. Google Don’t like multiple hyphen in Domains, Yahoo seems to be Fine
2. Submit your Sitemap to yahoo and MSN
3. Getting into Yahoo Directory don’t help in getting more Traffic
4. Why SEO (long term) > PPC (short Term)