You know that saying ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’, well the same is true today when it comes to search engines. Many websites solely focus their optimization efforts around Google, but that would be a mistake. While Google is currently the leader in the search engine market, several other search engines are giving them a good run for their money, including Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask Jeeves, and InfoSpace. During the month of July, Google comprised 36.5% of the domestic search market. Yahoo, however, was not far behind with a healthy 30.5%. As such, it makes sense to have your plastic surgery site optimized for Yahoo as well as Google.
Fortunately, the algorithm Yahoo uses for ranking web pages isn’t too far of a departure from Google’s. As such, it isn’t necessary to start from scratch while optimizing your site for Yahoo. As with other search engines, there are several factors that Yahoo considers in determining page rankings.
Like most other search engines, keyword density factors into Yahoo’s determination of rankings. However, this seems to carry more weight with Yahoo than with Google. The most high-ranking pages on Yahoo tend to have a larger number of keywords, particularly in the body text and title, than those lower down in the results. The keyword density in the title is of particular importance to Yahoo, followed by the keyword density in the body text and in meta tags. When it comes to keywords in the link text, however, Yahoo appears to give this less importance than Google does. Like Google, Yahoo also recognizes the importance of good link building. Your site should have plenty of backlinks with appropriate link text. However, with Yahoo this must, again, be supplemented with copious keywords in the title and body text.