Improve Your Web Site's Yahoo Ranking

Since Yahoo! is still one of the most popular search engines, it's in every business's best interest to improve its placement in Yahoo! search results. There are several methods you can employ to optimize your site to appear higher up in Yahoo!'s search results.

Meta Tags

To begin optimizing your site for Yahoo!, start with your meta tags. Yahoo!'s spidering process analyzes these tags and uses them to determine rankings. Make sure your meta tags include popular keywords that are relevant to your site's content.

Page Titles

Changing your site's page titles may also be effective. The title of your page is the text that appears in the top bar of a user's browser when they view one of your Web pages. But search engines also use page title information to index Web pages.

Instead of using your company name on all of the pages, try adding your company name as well as a description of what that particular page contains. For example – My Company Name – Popular Books at Great Prices.

ALT Text

Adding ALT tags to the images on your site can make your content friendlier to Yahoo!'s indexing process, too. Since a computer can't "see" your images, you can use ALT text to describe the images on your Web pages. ALT tags are HTML tags that describe the images on your site. You can also use keywords to describe your images in the ALT tag to take full advantage of this method. If your page uses images to display content, and you aren't using ALT tags, it may be glossed over during indexing.

Links to Your Site

Yahoo! also uses the number of links that point to your site to determine your page ranking. Increasing the number of sites that link back to you can improve your ranking, but not all links are equal.

The more popular a site is, the more weight is given to links from that site. So a link on microsoft.com, for instance, would count far more than a link on someone's personal home page. For precisely this reason, it won't do much good to add your link to "link farms" or other mass-linking pages that don't provide any content.

However, if you can exchange legitimate links with other sites, by all means, do so. This is a great way to move your site up higher in search results.

Site Map

If you have noticed that Yahoo! hasn't indexed all of your pages, it may be time to add a site map to your site. A site map will help Yahoo! find pages that may otherwise be buried within your site. This can be as simple as a plain HTML document that contains links to every single page on your site. A map is usually organized by topic or page location.

Sponsored Listings

If you still can't improve your Yahoo! ranking, consider their sponsored listing program. This is a paid advertisement for your company that will appear before other sites in your listing category for your business.