New Yahoo Clues Search Keyword Tool

Came across the blog post on a fun new Yahoo search keyword tool today called Yahoo Clues. Put quite simple, the new tool gives you insight into the types of people searching for specific keyword phrases and shows related terms based on those searches and searchers. The video below will introduce to Yahoo clues and how to use it. It also gives some examples that highlight some interesting uses for Yahoo! Clues as well.

Yahoo Says Better Be Optimized For Bing Soon

Webmaster Magazine reported that search engine Yahoo released an update to advertisers on Friday to announce that they will start serving organic search results from Microsoft’s Bing search engine starting in August or September. They advised that if you rely heavily on organic search engine traffic from the current Yahoo engine, you need to make sure you are now optimized for Bing instead. In another post, they give 5 steps on how to be Bing ready. The one that jumps out is the Bing Webmaster Tools as I know several webmasters have never even explored them before. SEO Book has an older post on Bing SEO strategies as well worth browsing. Overall, I suggest not going over board on any of this. Making sure you register with Bing tools and basic optimization as if you were ranking for Google should be the priority. Trying to make adjustments for each search engine will drive you crazy. Common sense really should be at the forefront. At least now there are really just 2 search engines to worry about instead of three.

RIP Meta Keyword Tag

Yahoo has now officially confirmed what many of us have come to speculate already was in effect. They no longer give any relevance to the meta keyword tag. Google, Bing and Yahoo all now ignore the tag which affectionately over the years had been called the spamming tag. I myself up until recently stop using the tag after many years of filling it in as habit. Now none of us have to worry about it all. One less thing to do when optimizing a page. Thanks to sonjay from the BANS forum for providing the link. RIP Meta Keyword Tag, you wasted a ton of my time over the years.

Bahoo Or Ying? How This Affects You!

If you have not heard by now, Yahoo and Microsoft have teamed up with one another web search wise. Both will still be separate sites, but in short, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will handle the premium search advertisers. Bing will be the algorithmic search and paid search platform for Yahoo.

So what does this all mean? Basically, if you are ranking well already in Bing, you are probably on the right track. If you rank better in Yahoo than Bing, you might have some worries. Yahoo is still very manipulative from an SEO standpoint whereas Bing is improving. While it may take some time for Bing algorithm to get implemented into Yahoo, you should probably start learning more about how sites are ranking in Bing.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the Site Explorer offered by Yahoo. It is a great tool to use to find out who is linking to who. You can rest assure that something will come out to replace it. Might be third party, might be something run by Bing. Jury is still out on that.

All in all both Google and the new Ying or Bahoo want to return the most relative result to the surfer. If you build sites that fill needs and answer the surfers needs, you will survive. Continue to work on quality backlinks and build sites others will want to link to and all should be well.

For a much deeper look at this, there is a great post today on SEOMoz by Rand Fishkin that breaks this down much further than I can. all in all, I am not to worried about and if you are building sites the right way, you should sleep well also.

Nofollow Means NoVote

When the tag nofollow came was introduced it was sorely misnamed. The correct name for the tag should of been noVote or IDoNotVoucheForThisLink. There remains a contant misunderstanding about this tag. For starters you would think that adding a nofollow tag to a link would mean that the major SERPS would just fly right past it, that is the furthest thing from the truth. It has been proven that both Google and Yahoo will indeed crawl the link and the jury is still out on exact proof that MSN Live crawls it.

With Google, you do not help your rank with a link tagged with nofollow, that has been known for sometime. Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already.

With Yahoo, you also do not get link juice or help yourself in the rankings as it excludes it from their ranking calculation. Yahoo will follow it and even index the resulting page if it is not indexed.

With MSN they thus far respect the nofollow tag as in not counting the link in their ranking as well, but it is not proven whether or not MSN truly follows the link or not.

So thus the fact that it should have been named noVote or IDoNotVoucheForThisLink as all 3 major SERPS claim no improvement in rank if a link is tagged with nofollow.

Here is a great interview I had bookmarked. It is a recent interview with Yahoo's own Priyank Garg. Garg is the director of product management for Yahoo Search Technology, YST is the team responsible for the functionality of Yahoo’s Web search engine that includes crawling, indexing, ranking, summarizing and spelling Web search functions along with products for webmasters, such as Site Explorer. Make sure to read it twice as it is specific to the way Yahoo treats the nofollow tag.

I hope this clears up the misconception of what the nofollow tag does and does not do.

Using Site Explorer & SEO Quake To Find Strong Backlinks

I am constantly on the lookout for the perfect site related backlinks to my BANS sites and non BANS sites. As of late I have been using Yahoo Site Explorer while using the SEO Quake browser plug in. I usually start in Site Explorer with the manufactures website. Let's say I have a site focused on GI Joe. I would plug in the URL of http://www.hasbro.com/gijoe/ into site explorer because I want to see sites linking to that website. USUALLY sites that link there will be toy related or even GI Joe specific which are sites I want links from to my site. SEO Quake comes into the equation, because while having it enabled, it will show the sites page rank, age, backlinks, whois and etc. I then make a list of the sites with PR 2 or higher and then go about researching the sites to see first if it is indeed a good candidate to trade links with, second that their links page is indeed dofollow. After compiling that list, I go about sending out my emails to the site owners informing them that I have added a link to their site on my links page and kindly ask for a reciprocal link. I usually like to do about 20 sites at a time and then give them a week or two to add me or decline. I then remove the links that have not answered or declined and then go to the next batch. If you come up with your own system doing this, you will slowly gain great backlinks from like sites and should slowly move up in rankings assuming your SEO and good content is in place as well.

Yahoo & MSN Live Getting Their Acts Together

I have noticed quite a few search enhancements over the last week or so with both Yahoo and MSN Live. For starters it seems the search results for a few queries I have done seem to be getting more relevant. Also it seems that both are getting quite a bit better with new site fresh content, especially Wordpress blogs. I posted a little while ago about Yahoo making improvements and indeed it seems they are getting on the right path as are MSN Live. Let us hope they both continue to prosper as much as I like Google, they definitely need competition to keep them honest and from being the Wal-Mart of the internets.

Have you seen improvements in both as well?

Yahoo Finalizing Search Index Update

If you are like me and watch your traffic logs, you are probably seeing either an increase or decrease in traffic from Yahoo. Yahoo announced late last week that they were in the process of rolling out some changes to their crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days and expect that the update will be completed soon. You can keep track of all Yahoo search message board activity here as well.

Look Hard At Your Search Engine Keyword Competition

You can really learn a ton from merely looking and studying your competition for keywords or phrases in the search engines. Type in a keyword or phrase into Google and click through to every page in the top 10.

Here are 5 things to examine on each and every page you land on:

META tags: Right click and view the source page of each page. Look at the title, description and keywords used in the META tags in relation to the keyword phrase. Use this tool and see how they rank for the keyword or phrase.

Backlinks & Anchor Text: Insert the page URL into the backlink checker tool to see what backlinks the page has and notice what type of sites the are linking to the page and the anchor text used in the backlink. If they are internal links from the same site itself also pay note to the anchor text.

Age of Site: Use the Web archive to see the age of the site and the Whois for when the domain was registered. Check to see if age is playing a factor.

Check Top Keywords Driving Traffic: Use this Complete tool for the top 5 keywords driving traffic to the page. Is the site ranking well for those keywords as well?

Do not limit yourself to just Google results, also check Yahoo and MSN. See if the same sites are ranking in the top 10 on multiple SERPS and pay particuliar note to those that rank in the top 10 on all 3.

Directories and you!

Everyone always clamors to submitting to directories for back links. What a lot of people do not understand is they do not hold much weight anymore with Google. I would limit to only submitting to PR5 or higher free directories and in no way would I submit to a directory that requires a back link from me. The only sites you should be linking to are sites in your niche. You are much better off paying Yahoo and getting into their directory, as it holds more weight. sometimes it can have an effect of 50 back links as it is a highly trusted directory in Googles eyes.




You will notice in the pictures above how trusted directories show up in Google searches. Back links from these type of directories hold great weight. Yes, most are paid submissions, but if you are serious about your BANS store I suggest paying the price!