What is new Yahoo?

Last year, Yahoo bought AltaVista, Fast, and Inktomi search engines. The new Yahoo results are none of these. Many people are saying that results come from a new Inktomi because results are similar; but results are also similar to all other search engines out there. In comparing these engines, it seems to me that Yahoo's results are from a brand new engine. Maybe they took parts and ideas from all search engines they bought - maybe they even took best parts - , but whatever they did, result is something completely new.

Which search engine is better?

I will be comparing Google and Yahoo for terms "music", "art prints and posters", "Bahamas real estate", "mosquito nets", and "liposuction". The other search engines all hold less than 4% of market share (except for MSN which uses Yahoo's Inktomi), so I won't be considering them. Here is what I found in top 10 results for each keyphrase:

Music

Yahoo offers a lot of music resource sites. Information about music from different sources such as magazine, TV and other music news sites are found 6 times in top 10 results. It also offered downloading and file sharing programs 3 times. The 10th result was an audio player program site.

Google has a lot more diversity. There were 3 music resource sites (but no magazines), one downloading program, one CD store, one radio station (Yahoo radio), one music directory, and 10th result was an audio player program site. Google also had 2 sites in its top ten that were of no value whatsoever; MP3.com which just has one page stating that they no longer offer services that they used to (with links to their parent company), and music.com, which is nothing more than an email gathering site for a newsletter (not a single link on entire page).

Google's diversity is a big bonus, but 2 spam/junk/useless sites really hurt it. The results? Yahoo 1, Google 0.

Art Prints And Posters

Yahoo offers 6 stores, while Google offers 5. The other links are all affiliate spam with no content whatsoever (just links to stores), with exception of one of Yahoo's links, which has some biographical content about artists. So Google has 5 spam sites, and Yahoo has 3 and a half.

Yet another round goes to Yahoo.

1: Buy right Domain names !

Further to this you should make your keywords readable by search engine, otherwise you're wasting your time. To do this is very simple you just use hyphens in name. eg excerciseequipment.com and exercise-equipment.com, first name here may look neater to casual observer and could and should be used to advertise your site offline its easier to remember and to type. But to SE's this is meaningless, they can't pick out keywords in there. The hyphen breaks keywords apart and allows SE's to read them.

You can have both sites pointing to same website but one with hyphens should be domain name that is actually hosted.

The other point to remember is that domain names can now have up to 67 characters in them including extension(.com, .net etc) now as opposed to original 23. So you can load your domain name with a number of keywords to boost your ranking, just remember to use hyphen to separate them out.

This also means that if a really great domain name has gone you can get something close and in fact better because you could simply add another keyword. Eg say exercise-equipment.com wasn't available, I could register best-exercise equipment.com or cheap-exercise-equipment.com.

I have a number of clients using this technique very successfully, and of course if you check out address bar above this very site does same thing. ;-)

For cheapest domain names online with best control panel online try www.123-reg.co.uk I highly recommend these guys I've used them for years now and register all my own and my clients domains through them.

2: Choose right Title for your page. The title of your page is what visitors will see across top of their browsers when they visit your site. Its important that each of your sites pages is titled differently to distinguish them from each other and to tie in with content of page.

This is also title of your listing when your site is returned in results of a Search Engine.

This is probably second most important thing to get right after choosing your domain name. If your domain name has good keywords then repeat these keywords in title of your page, add a hyphen and then add your keyword rich title for that page. So going back to example above exercise-equipment.com your title should probably be along lines of best exercise equipment - best, cheap, new and used exercise equipment.

<title>best exercise equipment - best, cheap, new and used exercise equipment< itle>

Notice how I get exercise equipment in there twice, first as name of site and then as a description of page.

I've mentioned keywords a fare bit already and I should probably say jump down to No5 for a better idea of what they are and how to use them.

3: Use H1 tag on title/heading of your page. A H1 tag is heading text tag in HTML. SE's give this tag more relevancy as it's generally used around title of a page eg <h1>best exercise equipment</>

best exercise equipment

but as you can see it looks pretty ugly and much to chunky for a nice looking site.

So here's a little known trick you can use to keep H1 tag but have text appear as normal. *whisper use css style sheets to shrink text back to size. The text will have a large invisible border around it essentially taking up same space on page as if it hadn't been styled but you can get around this with a clever layout. Check title of this page '10 ways to Optimise your site' that's a H1 tag that's been fixed. Big difference isn't there.

This is a little known but very useful secret. ;-)

Here's code to do trick, place it in head tags of your page -

<style type="text/css"> <!-- h1 {font-size: 13px;} --> </style>

Its that simple, play around with font-size until its in proportion to rest of your page. Remember it's title of your page and should stand out a little from rest of text.

4: Meta tags are still useful. Choosing keywords. Not as important as they once were due to abuse. But still used by a number of well known search engines. But not at all by others. Which means its still important to use them to cover all your bases.

Essentially meta tags you should be using when targeting search engines are keywords, description and robots. There are a number of others I'll touch on in a second.

Keywords should also contain keyphrases and list all keywords/keyphrases relevant to your site. There are two ways to list your keywords/keyphrases. Either with commas separating them or without. The benefit to not using commas is that keywords side by side can also be read as keyphrases by SE's. Where as a comma separates everything out. So not using commas allows for some odd combinations to be picked up by SE's.

<meta name="keywords" content=" best exercise equipment cheap home gym equipment health good exercise order online">

That's just an example off top of my head I haven't researched words as I normally would, you should also have much more in there around 30 words at least. Notice again I've started of with 'best exercise equipment' to echo and boost use of that phrase elsewhere as discussed above.

The description is self explanatory again and it's a good move to echo title of page and fill it out a little so -

<meta name="description" content="best exercise equipment - best, cheap, new and used exercise equipment reviewed and available to order online">

The robots tag is very simple and is not strictly necessary but useful. What it does is tell visiting SE spiders what to do when it comes to listing your site. Spiders are little programs that crawl web gathering info on websites for SE's. You can also use something called a robots.txt file to further control spiders, but I won't go into that here since its not strictly necessary and robots tag is enough for our aims at moment.