In this issue

This month I have asked our search engine guru John Ring to update us with the status of Yahoo.  Yahoo has completely changed its search offering and means the market is not as dominated by Google as it once was.   

Check out John's web site at http://www.ringjohn.com .

"Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web" didn't sound too catchy in April 1994 so they decided to go with the even catchier "Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" - known to you and me as Yahoo!

What started out as a human-edited directory of websites has now become a major player in the search industry. Following Yahoo's IPO in April 1996, the company lost much of its corporate focus during the dot-com heyday of the late 90's & has since struggled to get back to what it sees as its rightful perch at the top of the Internet hierarchy.

Its nearly there. The fight back from corporate failure started with the appointment of CEO Terry Semel in 2001. Having seen what Google had done in the field of search since 1996, Yahoos' Semel decided that the best way for his slumbering giant to become a major player again was by concentrating on search.

In 2003 Yahoo! bought Inktomi ($235M), Overture ($1.6B), Altavista & Alltheweb. In February 2004 they also stopped paying Google for the use of its results in favour of their own. The result? A rather impressive $101M first quarter profit announced last week thanks mainly to the willingness of companies to spend on Overture's "Pay Per Click" advertising system. A series of other changes were also made at Yahoo! earlier this year.

What do the Yahoo! changes mean for you?

Depending on what your website sells and where your target market is, the recent changes can affect you in several ways. Lets look at the three major issues:

Yahoo! Directory

Q: Should I pay £199 ($299) to have my website manually reviewed and included in the Yahoo! directory?

A: This is not as useful as it once was. Being listed in the directory is currently of no help to your ranking in the search results.  The only value of such a link is that your site will receive a slight boost by Google as Google sees a Yahoo! link to you as a good indicator that your site is of good quality. Get 5-10 other good sites to link to yours and you'll save yourself £199.

Natural (Organic) Search Results

When you search on Yahoo! you normally see the "Top 20 Web Results". These are the free results that were previously provided by Google but are now supplied by a hybrid of Inktomi and Altavista which together have been merged to create the new "Yahoo! Slurp" - Yahoo's new "spider" which visits as many web pages as it can find and places them all in its database which is what we search at Yahoo!

Incidentally, Google works in the same way with its Googlebot spider and this has historically been the best spider at finding content on the web but Yahoo's Slurp appears to be just as aggressive at present which is good for all webmasters. To ensure Slurp finds your site, you need several links to your site from other relevant sites already listed in Yahoo! The more links the merrier in fact!

Ranking

All this begs the question of course that once you get listed by Yahoo, where will you rank on the results? Listing and ranking are two very different things. At present, ranking well on Yahoo! means sticking to the following guidelines:

[Title] This is the most important item on the page. Use approx 10 words using as many variants as possible which accurately describe what your page is about. It will be what the searcher sees first so make sure its good english. Yahoo will list 60 characters maximum.

[Meta tags] You should pay more attention to meta tags now. 

• Description - Use 15-20 words emphasising the keywords used in your Title tag.  The meta description tag is indexed by Yahoo like the body text.
• Keywords - Although Google ignores this due to past abuse by webmasters, its still useful for Yahoo! so put your key phrases in here separated by commas. 

[Content] - Have the heading on your page a repeat of the title. Next make the first text on the page a repeat of your Meta Description.  Finally have approx 200-300 words of good text content on the page which mention the keywords you are targeting several times.

[Images] - Always use your keywords in the Alt tags on images. 

Pay Per Click Ads

A) Sponsored Results / Overture Ads

Following the purchase of Overture, very commercial keywords such as "debt consolidation" can cost advertisers up to £14 per click. One click = one visitor. The more you pay, the higher on Yahoo! you appear.

These text ads are known as "sponsored results". For high cost keywords such as the above example, there are normally four Overture results on top of Yahoo! followed by the "Top 20 Web Results" as detailed above followed by two "more sponsored results" at the bottom of the page.

While Overture ads have bid prices that start at 10p per click, ensuring excellent results for the lowest possible price is a specialist skill in its own right. There are a variety of 3rd party tools such as GoToast, BidBuddy etc which all assist advertisers to get the maximum return on their ad investment but these can work out quite costly.

B) Site Match

"Site Match" is the main element of the new system introduced by Yahoo! in March. It consists of charging you a flat rate "annual review fee" per URL. Prices are $10-49 for inclusion in the program and either $0.15 or $0.30 per click depending on the nature of your product/service.

The main difference between "Site Match" and the "Sponsored Results" (Overture Ads) is that if for example you are in the "debt consolidation" industry, you can get traffic for approx 20p per visitor instead of the £14 you would need to pay to appear as the first listing on Yahoo!

The downside of this scheme is that despite paying for inclusion into Yahoo's index, your pages are not guaranteed high rankings meaning you still need to optimise your pages as detailed in 2) above.

Yahoo! Summary

While its been less than two months since the changes were introduced, our experience indicates that Yahoo! is looking closely at the text on your website and is quite slow to list sites.  Google has historically been very fast to list new sites but prefers to look at what other sites say about your site. 

If you have the budget or are in a hurry, buy Overture ads in the short term. Its guaranteed traffic but at a cost. If you can afford to wait several months, build up the text content of your website and optimise it as outlined above. Then get as many links as possible. The more competitive your sector, the more links you will need. 

As an example, to rank well on any of the very competitive phrases of "debt consolidation", "weight loss" or "business information" will typically require a link from approx 2,000 different websites. When you have all this done, you will be top of Yahoo!