How to rank on Yahoo!

As the following text points out, Yahoo are focusing heavily on page criteria.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Users are more likely to click a link if the title matches their search. Choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.

Sound advice to make the title tag descriptive of the pages contents as this is what people will see in the search results and click on.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “description” meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.

This is the clearest indication that Yahoo read and give weight to the meta description tag, make sure that the tag is a desriptive sentence with all of the pages keywords present. I would aim at no more than 3 lines.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Use a “keyword” meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.

Clearly Yahoo hold weight to the Meta keyword tag, what once was deemed to be a spammy aspect of ranking tactics is now an ok method of getting your sites message across – by no means stuff it full of keywords and repeat them to the extreme, just make sure that the pages keywords are mentioned twice or so in the tag.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Keep relevant text and links in HTML. Placing them in graphics or image maps means search engines can’t always search for the text, and the crawler can’t follow links to your site’s other pages. An HTML site map, with a link from your welcome page, can help make sure all your pages are crawled.

Basic sound seo advice, keep links and text plain HTML that way the spiders can read and follow the links.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Use ALT text for graphics. It’s good page design to accommodate text browsers or visually impaired visitors, and it helps improve the text content of your page for search purposes.

From this it is clear that Yahoo, read and asign weight to the alt text. Make sure that the text describes the image, but be sure to include a keyword to increase your keyword density.

£ Quoted from Yahoo: Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages. Note: “Link farms” create links between unrelated pages for no reason except to increase page link counts. Using link farms violates Yahoo!’s Site Guidelines and will not improve your page ranking.