Download How Can I Improve My Business Web Site`s Ranking on Yahoo

How Can I Improve My Business Web Site's
Ranking on Yahoo?
Since Yahoo is still one of the most popular search engines, it's in every business's best
interest to improve its placement in Yahoo search results. There are several methods you
can employ to optimize your site to appear higher up in Yahoo's search results.
Meta tags
To begin optimizing your site for Yahoo, start with your meta tags. Yahoo’s spidering
process analyzes these tags and uses them to determine rankings. Make sure your meta
tags include popular keywords that are relevant to your site’s content.
Page titles
Changing your site’s page titles may also be effective. The title of your page is the text
that appears in the top bar of a user's browser when they view one of your Web pages. But
search engines also use page title information to index Web pages.
Instead of using your company name on all of the pages, try adding your company name
as well as a description of what that particular page contains. For example – My Company
Name – Popular Books at Great Prices.
ALT text
Adding ALT tags to the images on your site can make your content friendlier to Yahoo's
indexing process, too. Since a computer can't "see" your images, you can use ALT text to
describe the images on your Web pages. ALT tags are HTML tags that describe the images
on your site. You can also use keywords to describe your images in the ALT tag to take full
advantage of this method. If your page uses images to display content, and you aren't
using ALT tags, it may be glossed over during indexing.
Links to your site
Yahoo also uses the number of links that point to your site to determine your page
ranking. Increasing the number of sites that link back to you can improve your ranking,
but not all links are equal.
The more popular a site is, the more weight is given to links from that site. So a link on
microsoft.com, for instance, would count far more than a link on someone's personal home
page. For precisely this reason, it won't do much good to add your link to “link farms” or
other mass-linking pages that don't provide any content.
However, if you can exchange legitimate links with other sites, by all means, do so. This is
a great way to move your site up higher in search results.
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Site map
If you have noticed that Yahoo hasn't indexed all of your pages, it may be time to add a
site map to your site. A site map will help Yahoo find pages that may otherwise be buried
within your site. This can be as simple as a plain HTML document that contains links to
every single page on your site. A map is usually organized by topic or page location.
Sponsored listings
If you still can't improve your Yahoo ranking, consider their sponsored listing program.
This is a paid advertisement for your company that will appear before other sites in your
listing category for your business.
How Does Google Determine Its Search
Rankings?
Unfortunately there's no simple answer to this question. Google uses a variety of different
proprietary methods to determine its search rankings.
Google's computers are constantly "crawling" the Internet to return accurate search
results. Once the data is collected, it's sorted using a number of different criteria. If your
site conforms to the majority of these criteria, your ranking will improve. With thousands
of businesses selling similar items, this is an essential way to beat the competition and
attract new business.
The details of how Google compiles its rankings are shrouded in mystery, but here are a
few of the ways Google prioritizes its search.
Keywords
Google's spidering process scans Web pages for keywords and indexes sites accordingly.
They use keyword density to determine what keywords to associate with each site.
As the name suggests, keyword density is the ratio of a keyword to the rest of the words
on a page. Google looks for keyword density of between 2 and 5 percent. For example, if
there are 500 words on a Web page, the keyword in question would need to appear 10
times to achieve a 2 percent keyword density. Words that appear less than 2 percent of
the time generally won't be indexed as keywords.
Google also looks for keywords and keyword phrases in your page titles and file names.
Page titles are the words that appear in the topmost bar of a user's browser, and file
names are the URLs themselves.
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Meta tags
Meta tags are keywords or phrases hidden in the header of a Web page. This is invisible to
the user of a site, but Google's spidering software recognizes them and adds them to the
index.
Inbound links
Next, Google's spidering software looks for the quality — and quantity — of links pointing
back to as site. Its proprietary PageRank technology counts the number of links pointing to
a site, but gives more weight to "important" sites. So a link on microsoft.com, for instance,
would count far more than a link on someone's personal home page.
The future
Google is constantly changing and refining its search technology. Optimization techniques
that work today may be useless tomorrow, so stay informed.
What Is Search Engine Optimization?
As you set up your business Web site and research how to attract new customers, you will
no doubt come across the phrase "search engine optimization." But what, exactly, does it
mean?
As the name suggests, it's the process of making your site friendly to different search
engines. This allows the search engines to index your site more efficiently, which in turn
translates into better ranking for your site in search results. And better search ranking
means more traffic to your site.
Meta tags
Meta tags are one of the criteria search engines look for relevant Web pages. Meta tags
are keywords that you place in the header of your HTML pages. They don't appear
anywhere on the page; they exist solely for the benefit of search engines. When an engine
indexes or "spiders" your site, the engine reads your meta tags and associates your Web
pages with these keywords.
Keywords
Using keyword-enriched content is becoming more popular as search engines go beyond
meta tags to index sites more efficiently. This process involves placing content on your site
that contains relevant keywords for your business.
For example, if you sell candles, the word "candle" will no doubt appear throughout your
site. The number of times it appears is called keyword density.
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Keyword density is calculated by a percentage. It can be calculated by adding up the total
number of words on your page, and seeing how many times the keyword appears. If the
word candle appears five times on a page containing 250 words, your key word density
would be about 2 percent.
Search engines vary in how large a density they require for indexing. Most search engines
are set to recognize keyword densities of between 2 and 5 percent. Don't sacrifice the
quality of your content by littering it with keywords. Remember, the goal is to get users to
your site so they can transact. A site full of gibberish keywords is very likely to scare away
a potential customer
Other methods
To circumvent this, many sites use optimized content that is uploaded to their server, but
not displayed for public use. A search engine will be able to find the pages, but your users
will not see them. This may improve search engine rankings in the short term, but in the
long run, customers will get frustrated if they can't find what they need on your site.
Other methods of optimization include using page titles, file name, and domain names that
contain pertinent keywords.
Because your domain name factors into your search-engine ranking, you could conceivably
improve your search results by including relevant keywords in it. Returning to our candle
example, if you wanted to optimize your domain name, you could register the domain
newcheapcandles.com.
Each search engine is different, and each one uses different criteria and software to index
Web content. This can make it extremely confusing to attempt to please them all. By
combining meta tags, page titles, and file names with keyword-enriched content, you can
ensure that your site will be friendly to the vast majority of search engines. This means
that your site will be listed early and often in search results, increasing
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