Optimize Your Website For Yahoo! Search

When building your site up with search engine optimization in mind, it’s easy to forget all the other sites that aren’t Google. Understandably so, as much of your search engine oriented traffic will be from the big G anyways. But for the amount of time it takes to put a little more focus into a few things, or even just add a few additional touches, you can make your site that much more appealing to the Yahoo! bot that will be crawling through your pages.

Compared to MSN/Live, Yahoo! will bring you a decent percentage more visitors overall, but I wouldn’t bank on it providing the majority of your traffic. Plenty of sites can rank number one for a term on Yahoo! and not make it even close to where they would like to be on Google. The traffic is a lot more high quality then MSN/Live as well, so it’s worth following these suggestions and tips to better optimize your site for Yahoo!

• Domain Age
  Not really a factor you can control, but it seems that Yahoo! provides a lot more weight to websites that have an older domain age. Other search engines do have a similar system, but Yahoo! appears to be much more reliant on this than others.

• Domain Name
  Avoid using multiple dashes in your domain name. While it isn’t always the case, sites that enter their keywords into their domain name and separate them by dashes are often considered spammy. Yahoo! doesn’t look highly on this tactic and it should be generally avoided otherwise.

• Authoritative Backlinks
  Considering that sites ranked higher in Yahoo! are not always ranked higher on Google or MSN/Live, requesting a backlink from the top 10 listings for your keyword on Yahoo! will provide much more successful results than doing so on Google. These backlinks will greatly increase your SERP standing.

• Bad Outgoing Links
  You will be heavily penalized for linking out to link farms or other sites that are in poor or bad standing with Yahoo!.

• Take Advantage Of Yahoo! Site Explorer
  This tool will show you all of the pages indexed on your site and all of the incoming links that the Yahoo! bot has found.

• More Link Freedom
  While receiving site wide links is an offense that can merit a ban from Google, Yahoo! doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about it. You’re obviously not going to gain the same amount of weight for it and using this method can merit a ban from Google. So if you decide to focus just on Yahoo!, this isn’t a bad idea. Focusing just on Yahoo! however, is a bad idea.

• Don’t Overdo It
  Standard on page SEO is often enough to get ranked properly on Yahoo!. Title Tags, H1 Headings, Static URL’s, and other basic link structure techniques are as fancy as you need for Yahoo!.

The differences between the search engines are vast, as such a small number come from anywhere besides Google. But by expanding your reach, you don’t lose anything besides a few extra minutes of your time.

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