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How to Get Listed in Yahoo and Google

Written by: Karen Scharf

Article Overview: Most site owners will optimize their web site for one search engine, either Google or Yahoo, and assume they have to forgo the possibility of being listed in the other search engine.

How to Get Listed in Yahoo and Google

By now you probably know that Google likes a keyword density of 2-3%, and will often ban a site for "keyword stuffing" if it goes over that level. In the meantime, Yahoo likes a keyword density of 7-8%, and it can be difficult to get a decent ranking if your site falls below that level.

Most site owners will optimize their web site for one search engine, either Google or Yahoo, and assume they have to forgo the possibility of being listed in the other search engine.

But you can get listed in both search engines if you know the secret.

Yahoo is better with natural language than Google is. Yahoo understands plurals and conjugations and will score them as the same keyword, whereas Google will not. So, by adding multiple variations of your keyword in your web page, you can score placement in Yahoo while not being penalized by Google.

And here's another tidbit of information - while many webmasters have abandoned use of Meta tags, Yahoo still gives consideration to keyword and description tags. So be sure to add your keywords to these tags, but be careful not to go overboard.

You'll also want to use a title tag that is five to seven words long and contains your keyword phrase. Your description tag should contain your keyword phrase at the very beginning and contain a 13-20 word complete sentence clearly describing your site.

Your keyword tag should have your main keyword phrase at the very beginning, should be no more than 250 characters long and have no more than three repititions of a single keyword.

Make sure you use only one heading 1 tag and that it also contains your keyword phrase close to the beginning. Build up as many relevant one-way links as possible, and include your keyword phrase in all of your in-line links.

And, of course, be sure to publish an XML sitemap and a robots text file.

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Article Tags: google, SEO, yahoo



Related Forum Posts
Yahoo traffic - Hi Louis, Yahoo has been one nut that I've been trying to crack for a while. We rank very well in Google and get some MSN traffic but Yahoo does not send anything my way. I thought signing up for the paid directory would help but it has just been a waste of money to date. If anyone has had success with Yahoo and has a suggestion, let me know!
Youtube belongs to Google? - [quote:3qlx3ro8]That is pure Google at work. [/quote:3qlx3ro8] I must say I never understood the fuss over Gates and his monopoly of Windows, and yet no one ever complains about the other monopolies that are out there. All food is made by 3 or 4 different companies, I think - each multi-million dollar company owns about 20 brands.... and then there are the companies that own restuaraunts... Pepsi owns KFC and PIzza Hut for example... and then Google or Yahoo - I think it's Yahoo that owns Google, actually - come along and buy up every software thing they can get their hands on ... We're all being swallowed up my monopolies and it's rather frightening to think of...
Yahoo keyword tool - Hi Benny, As far as I know Yahoo doesn't have a similar tool. The Overture system was based on Yahoo but they shut down their free tools. If you're targeting the North American market though, Google is the main game in town.
Forums Speed Issues - If you've been on the forums in the past few days you may have noticed a significant lag in the time it took to load the posts. After checking the logs it seems that Yahoo!'s Slurp web crawler has been hammering my entire site (including the forums). It's great that Yahoo! is on the site but considering Google sends us over 80% of our traffic, it's not worth having the site performance go way down so Yahoo! can find more posts. Yahoo! suggests putting a delay on the queries it makes to your site so we've changed it to 30 seconds between Slurp requests. You can do this by editing your robots file. Ours now includes: User-agent: Slurp Crawl-delay: 30 Thank you to everyone for your patience and hopefully this resolves the issue!
Yahoo resubmit - I wrote to Yahoo! and they suggested re-submitting my site so I've done it. I don't think there is too much keyword overoptimization - most of the articles on the site I don't have control over as they are submitted by my authors but we do optimize for the keywords they provide which has worked out very well in Google. I'll keep updating as I hear back from Yahoo! and hopefully get some noteworthy results!


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