Search Engine News :: Optimise Web Sites for Organic Search

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Optimizing for Yahoo: The Next Big Thing: "Yahoo has a marked affinity for more keywords on the page when compared to Google. The analysis brings out the trend that most high-ranking pages generally have a larger number of keywords--primarily in the body text and title--than the pages that trail behind in SERPs. And interestingly, while the most high-ranking pages have an average overall keyword density of 9-10%, not all the high-ranking pages have that much keyword density; some have only 2-3%. This, in fact, is the upshot of the role played by backlinks, as will be explained later. Below is the breakup of various on-page factors and their respective keyword densities that make up the overall keyword density of a page:

Title - 15 to 20%. (This is one of the most momentous factors in the current Yahoo algorithm.)
Body Text - 2.5-3%
Meta Tags - 2-3%"

Yahoo apparently treats backlinks and link text in a different manner than Google. The statistics gathered reveal that most pages ranking well for an ‘allinanchor:keyword’ search don’t always top the charts on doing a generic keyword search. This demonstrates that Yahoo doesn’t give exceeding importance to link text, contrary to Google, where ‘allinanchor:keyword’ and generic searches still yield somewhat identical results with a little change in the order. As stated earlier, good link building and appropriate link text need to be further supplemented with copious keywords in title and body text