The fact of the matter is that despite Google’s ever growing popularity, yahoo remains a major player in the market and includes an enormous network of websites. Take a look at the stats which clearly shows that yahoo is certainly not discounted by internet surfers/browsers

2008 year end market share table

Still not convinced! Let me put it to you another way. If you were selling clothes, food what ever products in a shop, would you choose not to target 16.7% of passers by with window displays and advertising? No! So why do it online?

It is also important to remember that a merger between MSN/Live and Yahoo is still on the cards which if merged would account for a whopping 25.4% of the entire search engines market share. By focusing your marketing efforts solely on Google you are not exploiting your full market potential.

Just imagine what an increase of 25.4% in sales or services would look like on your balance sheets. In today’s current climate can you continue to afford to miss out on this market?

Yahoo Search Engine Optimisation

Optimising for multiple search engines can be challenging due to the algorithm differences between Google, Live and Yahoo. Yahoo algorithm is based on that of Inktomi which Yahoo purchased back in 2002 as part of their plan to stop serving Google results to search queries.

There are however common elements that can be focused on to aid high rankings across all the search engines:

Keyword Density
Site Structure
Backlinks
Aging

Yahooseo is a sub site of the seo-authority.com, we specialise in search engine optimisation across all the major search engines with an emphasis on Google. Are work is weighted towards search engines as per the SE market share to ensure you are correctly proportioning you seo efforts

Keyword Density

We cannot accurately specify a keyword density for you to target on your website. There are two reasons for this. First, if there is a delay between the writing of this information and when you read it specific numbers could well send you off in the wrong direction. Second, you will need to analyze your specific competitors to determine what the best density is in your area and for your type of website. Optimal keyword densities are no longer a one-size-fits-all calculation. Your industry and site-type will affect the optimal densities and thus a top 10 competitor review will be required to determine this. Please take a look at our Complete Audit & Analysis Report service that covers this element along with a hole host of seo on-page analsysis.  

Site Structure

On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo! While having a good site structure is important for a variety of reasons, it was on Yahoo! that one of our seo clients noted the most significant gains when we brought their homepage and key internals into compliance with W3C standards. While slight gains were noticeable on both Google and MSN they were so minor that they may well have just been part of the ebb-and-flow of the results. On Yahoo! however we noted a three page jump the day the changes were picked up. No other changes to the site were performed during this time.

The site structure is important for two key reasons. First, the site structure determines the order in which your page content gets seen by the search engines and thus, which content will be given the highest priority. 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.

Backlinks

Like the other two major engines, having a solid backlink count from relevant sites using good anchor text practices is a major factor on Yahoo! for any reasonably competitive phrase. When it comes to calculating backlinks Yahoo! is far more similar to Google than MSN. Aspects of backlink counts that must be taken into consideration when optimizing your website for Yahoo!:

Position of link - like all the major engines, the position of your link on the page is important. A link at or near the bottom of the page is less valuable than a link nearer to the top. Also, if your link is on a page with other links, the effect that link will have on your rankings decreases respective to the number of links on the linking page.

Anchor text - the text used to link to your site will help reinforce that the keywords in that anchor text are associated with your site/page. Also, if that anchor text in in the midst of the content it will hold greater weight than if that anchor text is in a directory-style format above a description (i.e. link a standard links page)

Non-reciprocal links - reciprocal links are certainly still valuable on Yahoo! however it is important to supplement these links with non-reciprocal links in the form of directory listings and other one-way links.

Website Aging

The bane of new websites is the 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. The aging delay on sites has been extended over the past couple years however it isn't as severe as that imposed by Google. New sites can expect to find it extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of 6 months even if everything else is in place. To add to the difficulty is a delay on the value of links. When a new site launches it obviously has no links. These links are subject to a delay that appears to be somewhere between 3 to 4 months before they hold their full weight.
The combination of these delays can make it very difficult for new sites to rank for competitive phrases inside of 8 to 12 months however because the restrictions are lighter than those imposed by Google one can expect to see rankings for secondary, tertiary and completely unexpected phrases far faster on Yahoo!

At the SEO-Authority, we can remove this arduous process across all of the search engines by purchasing clean, keyword strong aged domains that will allow you to rank immediately after your SEO efforts are complete. Please contact our consultants to discuss your needs further.

Aged Domain Name for sale!