Is Yahoo SEO Worth Doing and Worth Investing In
Majority of the webmasters are optimizing their websites for Google. However, only a handful is doing search engine optimization for Yahoo. This led to the popular question among many bloggers today – Is it worth doing SEO for Yahoo?
The main goal of search engine optimization is usually to get more visitors to their websites. When it comes to traffic generation, Google is the better search engine being the leader in the online search industry. Year over year, Google successfully maintained its complete dominance of the market.
As of March 2013, Google had a commanding lead in the US market with 67.1%, slightly down by 0.4% versus the February’s market share of 67.5% based on the Comscore data on US search engine ranking. Trailing way behind Google is the Microsoft sites like Bing with only 16.9%. Yahoo is the third widely used search engine in the US with a market share of 11.8%.
According to the same report, Google sites enjoyed 20.4 billion explicit core searches for the month of March 2013. This is followed by Microsoft sites with about 3.4 billion searches for the month. Yahoo, ranked 3rd, has 2.4 billion searches. Based on this data alone, it is already safe to conclude that conducting Yahoo SEO is truly worthwhile. It has great potential in capturing targeted hits since its monthly usage in the American market is relatively high at 2.4 billion searches.
So, even if you are able to capture just a minute share of Yahoo’s market like 0.1%, for instance, this already equates to 1 million page views to your webpage. Assuming that your conversion rate is very poor at 0.5% and your average sale is $10 per transaction, you will still earn $50,000 per month on an average if you are successful in getting your website to the front page of Yahoo for a highly-searched term.
How to Conduct Yahoo SEO
Regularly publish original contents
Content is still king not just in Google but also in Yahoo. One of the ranking parameters of Yahoo is content uniqueness and quality. Therefore, regularly add new posts in your website if you are going to optimize your blog for Yahoo. Avoid using duplicate contents because this could potentially hurt the ranking position of your big. Instead, make each post unique. Provide valuable and helpful information, as well.
Posts that are highly valuable will be referred to others via email and through social media in the form of likes and shares. This will further improve the traffic. The increasing visits to the site can be construed as a sign of the blog’s popularity due to the valuable information in one of its pages.
Get rid of broken links
A broken link is a reflection of poor website maintenance. Search engines like Yahoo would like each site to provide utmost user experience, and they reward those sites with better page rank. A broken link will cause bad experience to the user.
Therefore, pages with broken links will also be treated accordingly by decreasing their ranking position in Yahoo. Obviously, you don’t like this to happen to your blog. That’s why you have to constantly check each link to ensure that the link is properly working and it really redirect the readers to the designated and relevant webpage.
Page uniqueness
It is not enough to regularly post original web contents. You must ensure that each page is unique in many ways, as well. Thus, uniqueness in all aspects of the webpage is important such as the content title, the tags and metatags, the keyword phrases, the page description, and so on.
External links to credible sources
Linking to external pages is also given due importance by Yahoo, with retrospect to search engine optimization. But the external link must also be credible and a highly respectable one. High-ranking external sources can help optimize your page because it further reinforces the credibility of the information that you provided to the readers.
Observe proper keyword placement
Good placement of your target keywords is one of the ranking parameters of Yahoo. Therefore, insert your target keyword phrases in different strategic places. Don’t put them all in one place. Rather, expand their placement not just in the article body but also in the title, in the metadata, in the video tags, and in the images, among others.
Aside from that, it is similarly important to use various relevant keywords and not just one phrase. Just like Google that provides additional ranking points to Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, Yahoo also rewards web pages that use LSI keywords.
Create a good internal link structure
Internal linking can improve the user experience of your blog visitors. It helps visitors get to the right pages of your blog and find the information that they are looking for. So make sure that each page is properly linked from either the home page or from other relevant pages. Don’t leave a single page hanging without a link.
When creating internal links, make sure to use relevant keywords as your anchor texts. Diversify the use of keywords and avoid using the same keyword phrase in all your internal links because this can also be a form of keyword stuffing. This can hurt your Yahoo ranking position.
These are just a short glimpse of the many things that you have to do when optimizing your website for Yahoo. While there are still other parameters that must be met, implementing the above techniques are helpful in some ways provided that you also avoid committing some of the mistakes.
It would be fruitless to do 90% of the SEO strategies while neglecting to observe some important search engine optimization rules. Regardless of what techniques you are using, make sure to strictly observe the content originality and the content uniqueness rule.
Likewise, keyword stuffing must altogether be avoided not just in search engine optimization for Yahoo but also for Google including the other search engines for that matter. While these may require extra efforts and time from your end, you will be duly rewarded with better and higher visitor count once you are successful in getting your website to the front page of Yahoo’s search engine result pages.
