How to optimize for Yahoo search
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Optimize your blog or web site for Yahoo search by following a few simple steps.
Everyone seems to focus on optimizing for Google, which is good since it’s the most popular search engine at the moment. But I never see as much discussion about optimizing for Yahoo search, the second most popular search engine.For a while, Yahoo was using Google results for their search results. Recently, they switched back to in-house techniques for determining SERP (search engine results position). Yahoo still uses similar techniques as Google for ranking pages, but there are key differences:
- Yahoo seems to place more emphasis on keyword density (how many times your keywords appear) than Google, especially in the title tag
- Yahoo doesn’t place as much emphasis on anchor text as Google
- Yahoo uses the “description” META tag, unlike Google
The best option I’ve found for optimizing for both Yahoo and Google simultaneously is the All-in-One SEO Pack. It’s a plug-in for Wordpress that generates optimized page titles and description meta tags for each page on your site.
For the description tag, it uses the first few words of the post. However, this means you need to be conscious of what those first few words are, so if you’re like me and write in a more conversational style, you might be out of luck. Here’s how to fix it.
For each post, include a brief summary of the post at the beginning (as I did with this post). The description META tag will then be generated from that rather than from whatever random text you choose to begin with. This way, you can still maintain your writing style while optimizing for Yahoo.
You may need to edit your older posts this way, but I think the payoff will be worth the trouble.