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Guidelines for favourable page content

The ideas presented are not specific to Yahoo , but will apply in general to other search engines. They look for the occurrence of the keyword(s) being searched in various areas of the page, and weight your site with respect to the keyword accordingly.

Some of the factors to consider when creating your page are:

1. Yahoo Category - If the keyword appears in the category in which your listing appears, then you will receive a significant boost in ranking. If you have a choice of being in a couple of different categories, pick the one that includes the best keywords in its name. Be sure to conduct searches on your keywords prior to submitting to Yahoo.
2. Title of the Web site - This is the company name. You'll see it as the hyperlink portion of the listing. When you submit to Yahoo, use an alphabetically favorable name if possible. The name will need to match the company name used when you registered the domain. You need to include the name in the Web site title and in your contact page. If not, Yahoo may reject your submission or change the title to what they feel better represents your company name. Web sites that use their domain name as their official company name. Yahoo will accept that too, be consistent.
3. Web Site Description - Always include your best keywords in the description of the site that you submit to Yahoo.
4. Web Site Domain - You'll improve your rankings by includin keywords in your domain name. In the case of Yahoo, you do NOT have to have each keyword separated by dashes, although that won't hurt. For example, if your domain was homeontherange.com and someone searched for the word "home," Yahoo would still count it as a match.
5. Weight - It is possible that Yahoo divides the number of keywords in the description (and possibly other areas) by the total number of words to compute a keyword weight. If your keywords occupy a higher percentage of the total description, then that keyword will have more influence. One strategy could be to minimize the number of total words in your description. However, this is generally not a viable strategy with Yahoo since it would limit the number of different keywords you can cover and your ability to write something that persuades people to click.
6. Proximity - When searching on a keyword phrase, the closer together the words in the search phrase are to each other in your description or elsewhere, the better you'll score. Both a word, and at least a derivative of each word, needs to exist in the listing. For example, you can search for European cars and still get a match on a listing containing European and the word "car" in the singular form. However, if the user searches for "European cars" (plural) using quotes around the phrase, Yahoo will not match on "European car" (singular) since the user requested an exact match.
7. Click-through Popularity - The other significant variable affecting Yahoo rankings is your click-through popularity. Yahoo is believed to track the number of people that click on your listing in proportion to the number of times your listing is being served. They are also thought to be measuring the length of time the user spends on your site before coming back to Yahoo. If your site reaches a "critical mass" in terms of popularity, you'll get catapulted into their "Popular Sites" box near the top of the page.

(C) 2010 Franside Ltd  Last updated: [Tue Feb 2 2010]