SEO For The Big Three

SEO For Yahoo!

Until recently Yahoo! acted very much like MSN, now it's leaning a bit more towards Google. Ranking a website well on Yahoo! requires a solid-sized site with unique content and a very good number of links.

While PageRank is a Google factor, Yahoo! does have some type of page value factor at play. Many moons ago Yahoo! was playing with a PageRank-like calculation called WebRank. They even went so far as to put out a beta toolbar testing it. This indicates that there is a factor at play in the Yahoo! algorithm similar to Google's PageRank - they just don't advertise what a specific page's value is.

Yahoo! is placing a large amount of emphasis on the age of links though not in the same way that Google is. We will get to Google shortly however to understand what to expect from Yahoo! one must understand that when you get a link to your website it won't hold it's full value for a number of months. While the exact number of months in unknown it appears to be around 8 before it hold it's full weight though it will hold some from day one and this weight will increase as time passes.

To rank well on Yahoo! you much optimize your site similar to what you would do for MSN and you must build a large number of inbound links and have patience as these links age. You will not see a sudden spike 2 weeks after a large link-building campaign, you will likely have to wait 3-4 months to notice any significant effect.

SEO For Google

Virtually every webmaster and website owner is primarily concerned about attaining Google rankings due to the significantly higher number of searchers using it. Provided that you are building your website following the best practices of SEO (i.e. unique content, a sizable amount of content, and a good number of incoming links) then your rankings are sure to follow, however due to their aging delay it will likely take longer than on MSN or Yahoo! Google considers the age of your links, your domain and even the individual page to be a factor and the longer your page has been online the better.

Essentially, ranking a site on Google requires that you take the same actions as for the other two, continue your link building efforts on an ongoing basis to insure that you end up with more-and-more links, and that you update your content and add content on a fairly regular basis (through the addition of a blog for example).

Tying It Together

The logical process for a new website or one at the first stages of SEO is to first target MSN. At this point you can focus your attention on continuing to build high-quality, relevant links to and content on your site which will continue to increase your value on Yahoo! and Google.

Analysis will be required to determine exactly what weight you will be giving to different areas. For example, if your onsite factors are optimized for MSN then you know that you will need to make up for this in the offsite factors for Yahoo! and Google. If you figured you would need 100 links to rank on Google then you will now need to up that number to account for the fact that you have optimized your site itself for a different engine.

During the analysis process you will likely want to use a tool to speed up the process of keyword density analysis and competitor link analysis. At Beanstalk we use a tool called Total Optimizer Pro though there are others out there (note: I have yet to find one that does what this one does as quickly and easily).

Conclusion

I am hoping that none of you read the title and were expecting to rank on the first page of all three major engines next week. Ranking highly on all three major engines takes time, patience and a good few rounds of tweaking to get the perfect balance of onsite and offsite optimization. Of course, as you can gather, done properly it's well worth the effort.

Sourced By: MarketingFind.com

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