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Google likes incoming links, especially links from high-ranking, on-topic pages that include keywords in the link text. Google doesn’t like over-optimized, high keyword densities and over use of keywords in headings, etc. like they use to.

Yahoo, on the other hand, looks at on-page factors more, such as keyword density, keywords in headings, etc. That is where the problem comes in.

Of course, they both look at everyting, but keep these two very important points in mind when you are trying to optimize your site.

When you search both Google and Yahoo for a keyword phrase, you will usually find a BIG difference in the Search Engine Results Pages or “Serps” as it is usually called. Serps just means the list of websites that show up when you do a search on any of the search engines.

Back to Yahoo and Google. Here’s why the results are different and in a nutshell what you have to do to rank high on each one of them.

Links from other websites are the most important thing to Google. The higher the ranking of the actual page your link is on the better. Remember it is NOT the ranking of the Home page of the site you are getting the link from, but the ranking of the page your link is actually on that counts.

The text in the link to your site is VERY important. It needs to have the keyword phrases you want to rank high for included.

Then the next most important thing to Google is the keywords in your Title tag and then the content on your page. If your content is over-optimized (too many uses of keyword phrases or too many keywords in your headings, etc.), that will hurt your ranking with Google instead of help you.

Of course, there are 101 other factors that count with both Yahoo and Google, but get the basics right and you will be well on your way to high rankings.

As for Yahoo, the content that is on the page is the most important. To rank high with Yahoo you need to use a lot of keyword phrases on the page, have a lot of keywords in the headings, have a high keyword density, etc.

Basically, Yahoo likes all of the things Google used to count as being important before Google decided that too many people knew this and were making the most highly optimized websites show up at the top instead of the most relevant sites.

Now you can see why the sites that show up high on Yahoo don’t show up high on Google and vice versa.

Bottom line: You could say that Google likes off-page factors (i.e. links) and Yahoo likes on-page factors. That’s an over simplification, but it is a good rule of thumb.

If you understand this one thing, you can get your rankings higher than most of your competitiors. Of course, you will have to get it all right if you want to be at the very top.

The problem is that you can’t completely do what it takes to please both Yahoo and Google. Of course, links help you with both Google and Yahoo, but the other factors seem to be either or.

If you have a reasonably good ranking on Yahoo and not Google and want to increase your Google ranking, I would recommend that you work on incoming links and particularly the text in those incoming links (and don’t make them all word-for-word the same).

Then start cutting back on the over-optimizing of on-page factors and see when your Yahoo rankings start coming down and your Google rankings start coming up. Try to see how close you can come to making them both happy if ranking as high as possible on both is your goal.

Of course, this has to be done slowly because Google and Yahoo don’t change their rankings that fast.

If you want to get the highest ranking on just one of the search engines and not worry about the other one, your job is much easier.

One last point.

Even though Google counts incoming links as being a lot more important than Yahoo does, the recent “search engine bombing” by political pranksters with the term “waffles” shows that Google is more immune to this than Yahoo. Obviously, Google wants a few other things to be in line before they will award top ranking to a site. Google is harder (if not imposible) to trick. Yahoo is not.

Craige Stacey has been studying search engines optimization as a hobby and has achieved some very good search engine positions in the past for membership website software

2009 is the year that SEO at long last broke into the mainstream, and is now a well-known practice utilized by firms wishing to lift their website’s search engine rankings. All the same, merely 5 years ago, SEO was judged to be simply cheating. And nowadays, how affairs have changed: now SEO calls for a broader group of skills in ethical areas : content writing, promoting a website via social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and link baiting (via composing great or controversial content that profits links from other sites).

Bing, Google, Yahoo! and other search engines have likewise evolved and are far more refined than merely appraising backlinks to decide search engine rankings : they can view for how many minutes people stay on your site, how many pages they browse, and in the main how “sticky” your site is.

And yet, of course backlinks are still fundamental to set rankings, and because of this you need to make your website a marvellous resource that individuals want to link to.

But if you can’t wait to rank, you can utilize Pay Per Click advertising. This is a bidding system where businesses bid a certain cost for each time the ad is clicked on. The sum one bids for is dependent on the keywords that in actuality activate the showing of your ad in the search engine results pages. Keywords are fundamental to the targeting of the people that actually click on your ads, and so PPC is a fantastic means to discover which keywords convert to sales and which don’t. If you are armed with this data, you can then pinpoint those keywords in your search engine optimization effort as well.

It’s wise to employ a company that provides pay per click services first of all, and gain knowledge and experience from their tactics. In this way you’re not only placing your website in the hands of pros, you can also gain experience from them as well.

Duplicate content is one of the problems that we regularly come across as part of the search engine optimization services we offer. If the search engines determine your site contains similar content, this may result in penalties and even exclusion from the search engines. Fortunately it’s a problem that is easily rectified.

Your primary weapon of choice against duplicate content can be found within “The Robot Exclusion Protocol” which has now been adopted by all the major search engines.

There are two ways to control how the search engine spiders index your site.

1. The Robot Exclusion File or “robots.txt” and

2. The Robots < Meta > Tag

The Robots Exclusion File (Robots.txt)
This is a simple text file that can be created in Notepad. Once created you must upload the file into the root directory of your website e.g. www.yourwebsite.com/robots.txt. Before a search engine spider indexes your website they look for this file which tells them exactly how to index your site’s content.

The use of the robots.txt file is most suited to static html sites or for excluding certain files in dynamic sites. If the majority of your site is dynamically created then consider using the Robots Tag.

Creating your robots.txt file

Example 1 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and make the entire site available for indexing. The robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. By leaving the “Disallow” blank all parts of the site are suitable for indexing.

Example 2 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to all search engine spiders and to stop the spiders from indexing the faq, cgi-bin the images directories and a specific page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation
The use of the asterisk with the “User-agent” means this robots.txt file applies to all search engine spiders. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will now not be indexed by any search engine spiders.

Example 3 Scenario
If you wanted to make the .txt file applicable to the Google spider, googlebot and stop it from indexing the faq, cgi-bin, images directories and a specific html page called faqs.html contained within the root directory, the robots.txt file would look like this:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /faq/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /faqs.html

Explanation

By naming the particular search spider in the “User-agent” you prevent it from indexing the content you specify. Preventing access to the directories is achieved by simply naming them, and the specific page is referenced directly. The named files & directories will not be indexed by Google.

That’s all there is to it!

As mentioned earlier the robots.txt file can be difficult to implement in the case of dynamic sites and in this case it’s probably necessary to use a combination of the robots.txt and the robots tag.

The Robots Tag
This alternative way of telling the search engines what to do with site content appears in the section of a web page. A simple example would be as follows;

In this example we are telling all search engines not to index the page or to follow any of the links contained within the page.

In this second example I don’t want Google to cache the page, because the site contains time sensitive information. This can be achieved simply by adding the “noarchive” directive.

What could be simpler!

Although there are other ways of preventing duplicate content from appearing in the Search Engines this is the simplest to implement and all websites should operate either a robots.txt file and or a Robot tag combination.

Should you require further information about our search engine marketing or optimization services please visit us at http://www.e-prominence.co.uk – The search marketing company