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Internet Marketing - Markmedia Articles |
Search Engine Marketing - Optimising For Yahoo
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.
This article was written by Mark McCormack from Markmedia, a
B2B marketing consultancy. Mark has over 20 years experience
in all aspects of marketing. His website is
www.markmedia.org.uk. This article is copyright and all
rights are reserved.
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