Most companies today take advantage of the internet as a major marketing and information dissemination tool. To maximize the use of the internet, companies rely on search engine optimization (SEO) to ensure that their websites and web pages muster enough traffic. Although search engine optimization aims to have websites at the top of almost all search engine result pages (SERPs), it’s quite common to see search engine optimization focusing on major search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

— Giant Search Engines Targeting —

It is hard to do search engine optimization resulting to a good ranking in almost all search engines since every search engine relies on different basis and categories on ranking sites. In other words, different search engines make use of different algorithms to determine every site’s importance. Criteria that search engines set for result ranking vary from search engine to search engine. As a result most SEO service providers opt to maximize sites for search engines that can provide the most ideal volume of traffic.

— Google-centric SEO is Short-Sighted SEO —

Most SEO’s would basically focus their efforts to maximize websites relative to Google because it is the most commonly used search engine. But if you take a closer look into the matter, you will conclude that disregarding the searches done through Yahoo could mean a considerable amount of lost traffic. Although Yahoo does not process as much searches as Google, it still consists a good fraction of the searches done on the internet.

— Balancing Google and Yahoo SEO —

Both Yahoo and Google depend on keyword density to rank a website. The only difference is that to optimize your site with the Yahoo search engine, a higher keyword frequency is required. Keyword density is more important a factor for Yahoo than it is for Google; although you don’t need to use the same word or group of words to attain the ideal keyword density. Yahoo will consider synonyms and other word variants that are of the same or related meaning to the given keyword to make up the keyword density calculation. Even the plural from of the keyword is still counted when considering keyword density.
Taking the keyword factor into consideration, though, Google and Yahoo possess a very different approach in keyword density. Since Yahoo is very much keyword-based, you may fear that stuffing your site with too many keywords would endanger your site ranking with Google. However, this is not really the case.

It is true that Google may turn its back on your site because of overwhelming keyword count. But as stated above, your site does not need to contain the same keyword form to attain the keyword density for Yahoo. Taking advantage of the fact that Yahoo counts synonyms, plural forms and variants in assessing keyword density, your site could justify both Yahoo’s and Google’s keyword requirement.

— Yahoo SEO Special —

Content is very important to attain a good ranking with the Yahoo search engine. This refers to both quantity and quality of your site’s contents. Be mindful of relevance of your site’s contents to a given keyword and at the same time make sure that your site is full of it. Adding relevant contents from time to time would also be a good strategy to take the top spots with the Yahoo search engine results pages.

Aside from content, format should not be taken for granted if you want to have Yahoo on your side. Unlike Google’s web spiders, Yahoo’s bot doesn’t dig deeper into your sites pages to index them. It is therefore very necessary for you to create a very good site map to guide this very lazy animal!

And lastly, even though Yahoo is very much into your site’s content when it comes to ranking in the SERPs, don’t forget that inbound links are still very important. Aside from making sure that your site does well with Google when it comes to links, Yahoo will also need the help it gets from inbound links to index your pages.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that webmasters try to implement on their websites, particularly if it’s an online business or if they want a lot of traffic to their sites. Basically, SEO is developing your website in such a way that the search engines will display your site whenever someone does an internet search for specific keywords that you have craftily sprinkled throughout your pages. With the millions of websites out there, it can be very difficult keeping up with the competition so that your site is displayed in the top few search results, or even the first two pages of search results. This article will describe a few things you can do when optimizing your site for the search engines.
Firstly, there are different search engines that people use to find information on the net. The top three that you should be trying to optimize your site for are MSN, Yahoo, and Google. We all want to be at the top of the Google search listings, but it’s a good idea to start with MSN and Yahoo, simply because it’s usually quicker to get indexed and you still get a significant amount of your website traffic from these search engines. You will get more traffic from Google, but it’s a little trickier and probably more competition there.

The next thing you want to do is come up with keywords for your website that you think a lot of people will do internet searches for. This is harder than it sounds and you have to be really careful to choose the right keywords and keyword phrases so that you can beat out the competition. The way to find the best keywords to use on your site is to use a keyword research tool that displays the number of times per month your chosen keyword is searched in the three major search engines. You may initially think that the more a term is searched, the more traffic you will get, but think again! The more a term is searched, the harder it will be to get your site ranked in the top few search results, or the first few pages of search results. You want to choose terms that are less popular, but still have a significant number of searches. A good number to aim for is any term that is searched about 5000-10000 times per month. It’s pretty difficult to do this without using a keyword research tool, such as Good Keywords.

Once you’ve found some good keywords, you want to go into the source code for your site and add those keywords to your HTML code in the right places. The best places to put your keywords are in the title tag, H1 and H2 header tags, the description tag, and then sprinkled throughout the text on your pages. Keyword density is an important factor that the search engines take into consideration when listing pages in the search results. While you want to repeat your keywords throughout your text, you also want to be careful not to overload your pages with the same keywords to make it obvious that you’re just trying to get ahead in the search engine listings. If you try this, you risk getting your site banned, so try to maintain a relatively high keyword density, but not too high.

Now that you have your site sprinkled with enough good keywords, it’s time to write articles on topics related to your keywords. Use those keywords in the article title, the first paragraph, within the body of the text, and in the conclusion, again without overloading the text with your keywords. There is no better way to get traffic to your site, links pointing back to your site, and the search engines to visit your site than by writing a good quality, original article with your search terms embedded throughout. These are the basics of keywords and SEO!