Yahoo recently launched an articles & resources section in its small business center. Of the articles available, there are several specific to search engine optimization including:
Search Engine Marketing Overview – “Search marketing probably is the most cost-effective method of advertising on the Web, allowing you to reach the largest possible audience for the least amount of money.”
Search Engine Optimization Overview – “Optimizing your site for search engines can be as important as simply having a web site.”
SEO-friendly Site Design – “To increase your search results ranking, design each element of your web site with your two audiences – humans and search engine “bots” or “spiders” – in mind.”
Building Keyword Lists – “Successful search engine marketers develop their keyword list first, and then build a single, highly relevant web page for each keyword phrase.”
Link Building Strategies – “To search engines, the most-linked-to sites are assumed to have the best content and therefore be the most relevant to searchers.”
There are a series of 9 articles on search engine optimization including tips on avoiding search engine spam and a guide to hiring a search engine marketing firm.
Standard fare for basic web site optimization but nice to see a major search engine make more specific recommendations about SEO in a positive light. The articles place search engine optimization at the same level of importance as the design and usability of a web site (and rightly so).
Although, I was a bit surprised to see the following rather liberal linking recommendation coming from Yahoo. Other search engines might view this as manipulating results. If I am wrong, please leave a comment.
“Cross-linking: If you have more than one site, start by connecting them because many search engines give higher scores to keywords in hyperlinks rather than in your page’s text. To do this, logically organize your content under unique domain names (make sure each domain has its own IP address by using a different host for the sites), create keyword-heavy hyperlinks, and send users between the sites. For example, if your site sells shoes, your initial URL could be shoes.com. You could also register the domain name shoes.sneakers.com and runningshoes.sneakers.com. On the home page for each site, you would link back and forth between all three. The key is to incorporate the keyword (in this case, “shoes,” into each link.”
For reference, MSN Search provides “Guidelines for successful indexing” and Google publishes its “Webmaster Guidelines“.
Tags: SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Yahoo, Google, MSN Search
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