Optimize your website for Yahoo

Search engine optimization is very important to the success of your website. Better search engine ranking means more visitors to your website and, hence, more profits. Your first step should be to optimize your website for the biggest and most commonly used search engines. There are several search engines on this list and one of the most important ones is Yahoo. That is the main reason why you need to know how to optimize your website for Yahoo if you want your website project to succeed.

You can use several techniques to optimize your website for Yahoo and improve your Yahoo search engine results. Currently Yahoo is using the Open Directory Project, or DMOZ, and Inktomi's base for ranking web pages. Open Directory Project is a large community of volunteer website editors on the Internet. Yahoo uses the relevancy of the title, description and category meta data from your web pages to determine whether to show your website in the search results. Yahoo also uses some of the technologies that it developed for determining which website to include in the search results.

Many of the optimization techniques that are used with other search engines are used with Yahoo too. The main and the most important thing to do to optimize your website for Yahoo is to focus on keywords, title tags and meta tags for your web pages.

Selecting the right keywords and key phrases for your web pages is very important. Make sure the keywords you selected represent the content of your web page. Go through the content of your web pages and make sure that you have the right keyword density for each page. Do not, however, overuse you keywords. The content of the web page should remain meaningful after the keyword density optimization process is completed.

You also need to include the keywords that you selected for the web page in the title tag and in the description that you will use in the meta tags. Yahoo checks your meta tags during the process of determining the relevancy of your web page. However, you need to vary your title, description and meta tags for each individual page. Optimize your meta tags on all secondary pages in addition to the home page.

An addition to all the techniques described above, you need to make each one of you web pages useful to the visitor by providing helpful and important content. Don't just create the web pages that include garbage as it will not help you and can even hurt you. Each of your web pages should also be user-friendly and easy to use and navigate.

You can also pay to be listed on Yahoo. Your first step would be to find a way to get listed on Inktomi, since Yahoo uses Inktomi base. Yahoo also offers several paid services to help you get listed on Yahoo fast: Site Match and Site Match Xchange, Pay-For-Performance, and Yahoo! Express.

 About the author : Jakob Jelling is the founder of http://www.sitetube.com/ Visit his website for the latest on planning, building, promoting and maintaining websites.