Before the arrival of Google, Yahoo! was the most popular search engine. When Google arrived, Yahoo had to face tough competition. Google brought with itself indisputably precise search results thereby occupying the leading position and making it the preferred search engine among the web-surfers. However, it is estimated that about 20-25 per cent of searches are conducted on Yahoo! Another major player on the market is MSN, which means that SEO professionals cannot afford to optimize only for Google but need to take into account the details of the other two engines (Yahoo! and MSN) as well. The SEO experts need to focus on Yahoo search engine optimization for capturing the 20-25 per cent of the market share in terms of the searches conducted on Yahoo.
Optimizing for three search engines simultaneously is not an easy task. Initially, the SEO community believed that the algorithm of Yahoo! was on deliberately just the opposite of the Google algorithm because pages that ranked high in Google did not do so well in Yahoo! and vice versa. So the efforts to optimize a website to appeal to both search engines usually resulted in getting kicked out of the top of both of them.
The algorithms of the two search engines are different, both are constantly updated, and none of them is made publicly available by its authors. The details about how each of the algorithms function are obtained by speculation based on probe-trial tests for particular keywords; so it is not possible to say for certain what exactly is different. The frequency with which algorithms are changed, it is not possible to track every slight change, even if algorithms' details were known officially. However, knowing some basic differences between the two does help to get better ranking.
For Yahoo search engine optimization, the basic approach remains the same. Like all search engines, Yahoo! too spiders the pages on the Web, indexes them in its database and later performs various mathematical operations to produce the pages with the search results. Yahoo! Slurp is the second most active spider crawler on the mesh. Just like other bots, Yahoo! Slurp will be able to find your web page only if the important elements of the SEO mix are present to take your web page to the top position. You can use the Search Engine Spider Simulator to check if your pages are spiderable.
In case of Google, they place more importance on factors such as backlinks, while Yahoo! sticks more to on page factors, like keyword density in the title, the URL, and the headings. Keyword usage can be a big factor as far as occupying the top 10 place in Yahoo! is concerned. If you have a keyword in the title and in the URL, you can expect a top 10 place in Yahoo!. Do remember that technically you can place no more than 3 or 4 keywords in the title and in the URL. Whether you are using the keyword in the basic form or you are using the derivative of the keyword that would also decide your position on the search engine.
Since Yahoo! is first a directory for submissions and then a search engine a website, which has the keyword in the category it is listed under, stands a better chance to be in the top of the search results. For Yahoo! keywords in filenames also score well. For Yahoo search engine optimization, keyword density is yet another important parameter - The higher the density, the higher the positioning with Yahoo. These are some of the common aspects of Yahoo search engine optimization.
