will score better than: Garden tools, including compost makers, rakes, shovels and more for term “compost makers.”

Keep in mind though, that this second example will score better on searches for term “garden tools” which is searched on 70 times more frequently than “compost makers.” You need to know what terms people are actually using to search for sites like yours. How to do that is subject of another article, but easiest method is still Overture’s (formerly Goto’s) tool, (currently located at http://inventory.overture.com/inventory/searchInventory.mp) Make sure that if you’re going to go to all work to rank high against a specific search term, that it’s one that people are actually using to search for your site!

It’s vital for you to not only know what you are truly selling, but also what is being searched on in your category.

4. Other factors. Every search engine applies certain weights to certain site criteria and change those weightings frequently. At moment, Yahoo is doing that in several areas, which may change:

A. Placement in Yahoo’s categories. Yahoo has not abandoned their old category structure, just changed way they list search results. They currently seem to be giving higher rankings to those sites that are categorized under top category for a given search term rather than lower priority categories.

B. Giving more weight to hyphenated URL’s than non-hyphenated URL’s with same keywords. Thus (everything else being equal) http://compost-makers.com would score better than http://compostmakers.com. This is especially true if keyword is not first element in URL: http://best-compost-makers.com would score better than http://bestcompostmakers.com.

C. Penalizing sites that have numbers or early-in-the-alphabet letters before keyword (probably in reaction to those who tried to beat their old alphanumeric ranking system): http://1compostmakers.com probably won’t even show up in first several pages of their listing.

D. Not differentiating between .com’s, .net’s, .org’s, etc. This opens up opportunities to achieve top rankings through purchasing alternative domains to .com standby. (Caution we have no idea how new .info, .biz etc. domains will fare in Yahoo’s new structure, so approach these with caution).

Several key issues are not yet clear at Yahoo: 1. There is no indication of popularity or link popularity affecting rankings. Yahoo is tracking click-throughs so it won’t be surprising to see popularity affecting rankings in near future. Link popularity may be farther out, as Yahoo isn’t currently spidering sites, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see an acquisition or licensing deal in future.

2. There are several thousand sites that are paying extra to be listed at top of category pages as sponsored sites. Yahoo has now significantly decreased value given to those paying partners by shunting as much as 75% of their search traffic off of category pages and into their search pages. They stand to lose millions of dollars in sponsorship revenues in next few weeks if they don’t quickly find a way to bring those sponsored links onto search results pages in addition to their category pages.

All of these changes are vital for internet marketers to understand. Not only will they most likely result in additional traffic to Yahoo, but for those who understand these changes it can yield major benefits of extra traffic, sales and profits!

Try a new search, make your query more regional "video rentals in London" or "holiday resorts in Florida". How many pages are turned out now? Modify your search terms any way you like until you have cut your competitors' pages to 1% or less of their original number, which is surprisingly easy to do. Make sure your terms are still relevant to your site, you want targeted visitors, not any random surfer who'll leave two page views after they enter. Once you have found a good search term add it to a meta keywords tag at top of a new page with content relevant to that keyword term. Place term in text of your page a number of times so that it appears naturally and often. Don't edit your keyword inadvertently by reducing it to a common abbreviation, for example, "airplanes" to "planes". Then submit your page to search engine, once it is listed see where it ranks and play with content to push it up ranking for your new keyword term, you have 100 times less opposition so your chances of getting a top ten ranking are enormously better.

Of course more specific phrases are searched for less than general terms so don't stop with one term do 10 or 20 and design a new page within your site with relevant content that contains each term repeatedly. Consider millions of searches performed each day and if your term isn't too obscure you should hope for it to turn up a few times every day on each search engine. Consider if you had 20 terms with top ten search engine rankings and each searched for three times a day in total across all search engines. That would give 22 000 extra highly targeted unique visitors a year and that is a very conservative estimate.