Jerry Yang and David Filo developed Yahoo during their time at Stanford. It was originally known as “Dave and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, but renamed Yahoo in 1994. Rather than building a search engine, Yahoo was originally a collection of web pages without indexing. It later added search functionality, but still claim it is more than a search engine.
During 2000, even Yahoo used Google, but eventually replaced the Google search engine with it’s own search technology.
Yahoo and SEO
Yahoo search results are now powered by Microsoft Bing. However, the same general tips apply to Bing and the process of how to rank well in Bing.
Like Google, Yahoo contends that the critical issue is the content. Content that is unique, relevant and has value is the first recommendation for building SEO success on Yahoo. It also recommends well placed key words used in critical locations such as title tags, meta-tags and appropriately through out the content.
Yahoo also recommends that every page of your site is unique, with its own title, meta tags, description and keywords.
Keywords should be connected to your target market, the content of the page and the branded image of the company, products and services offered. There should be no deceptive tricks with keywords luring people to a site unrelated to the keywords.
Yahoo recommends that you build your site for the people first. Good writing and good links are important. Content that draws people in and keeps them there (sticky writing) will lead to positive search engine page rank results.
Yahoo also crawls through the site from the top to the bottom; looking at the title, header and introduction as well as the body of the page. Keywords and the natural readability are factors in search engine page rank for Yahoo.
Critics of Google point to the idea that Yahoo is a search engine and more, a web portal with tons of features and Google is a search engine, without the portal features.
Clear site structure works well with Yahoo. It is important that the bots can crawl through the hierarchy of the site, if you want good results on Yahoo; your site needs to be well structured. Developing a clear, concise taxonomy is a good place to start. Content toward the top of your page is given more weight in the SEO process than content toward the bottom of the page.
Backlinks, or inbound links from other sites with strong relevance can improve your search engine page rank results. Having a diverse mix of link types from trustworthy and relevant sites can improve your search results significantly.
Yahoo also considers aging in the search result process, with older sites having the upper hand. It is often difficult for new pages to score as well as sites that have been online for a longer period of time.
The critical issues for Yahoo are still content, links and keywords but the process is different than Google.
