The Other Search Engines

**Jamesanderson** · 11-29-2004, 07:14 AM

I read an interesting article today from Site Pro News, which is a great source for information. If you have not subscribed to their ezine I would encourage you to do so (and Wep Pro News). Both are a great source of good articles and a great place to get articles published.

Anyway back to the topic, No. 1 in Yahoo and how is it acheived. Well the article made quite few points and at the end gave this list of things to get right.

Have a descriptive URL.
Use keyword enriched titles on each page of the site.
Place keyword enriched description and keywords meta tags on each page of the site.
Use robot.txt files to keep Slurp out of your shopping cart or log in pages.
Place keyword enriched text in the first paragraphs of your site-copy.
Use HREF links to direct Slurp through each page of the site.
Add a sitemap page and be certain there is a link from the index page to the sitemap.
Be certain that geographic specific information is mentioned on each page of the site. Always have a contact page that also lists geographic specific information.
Write a press release and send it to as many blogs, news-wires and press release sites as possible.
Acquire strong, relevant incoming links from sites with topics similar to yours.
Update your site frequently.
Enjoy and value your placements.

Read the full article here, Site Pro News. One of the points it made I found rather interesting. Adding your business address to each page with the longitude and latitude of your business address will help to optimise for local searches and regional specific ones. I suppose it makes sense and would mean Yahoo must have compiled a database loaded with the longitude and latitude with geographical references. I couldn’t believe this when I read it but it would make results better sorting out the problem with all the duplicate city and town names out there (especially in the US where we just brought our list with us). I probably didn’t want to say that in a heavily US based forum, oh well I’ll just blame it on the laziness of the English and try to look sincere

.

Or it could just be the CIA making it easier for themselves to point the giant eye in the sky at your business address (thought I would try to keep all you conspiracy theorists happy as well).

**reload2** · 12-04-2004, 11:10 AM

Yes, it's a lot of information, but I suppose it's mostly pretty obvious.

**madmonk** · 12-06-2004, 02:30 PM

it looks like spam to me.

**Jamesanderson** · 12-11-2004, 01:55 PM

What part do you find spam madmonk?

**Chris Choi** · 12-23-2004, 06:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jamesanderson

What part do you find spam madmonk?

I don't find this spammy. Even though alot of people might know this information,
I don't see how this won't help newbies. You shouldn't worry about it that much
because people sometimes are very "protective" about forums if they think
you're posting for your self gain. I'm not pointing fingers but I've seen some
psychos moan and complain because I recommended a few softwares names
(without even providing the links).

**Anat** · 01-06-2005, 03:01 AM

That's pretty much good old basic SEO really. It's true for all engines, not just Yahoo. Except maybe for the part dealing with the robot text file. Actually, my sites follow everything said here, except for the Slurp/robots.txt file recommendations, and some of them rank #1 on Yahoo for their chosen keywords as it is.

**TaylorAtCTS** · 01-08-2005, 04:59 PM

robots.txt files are kina important.. i try to keep the spiders out of my CSS, javascript, and image files or theyd be spending more time indexing that and less time indexing the important pages.

**gsyi** · 01-08-2005, 07:01 PM

Backlinks are most important to yahoo

**Jamesanderson** · 01-14-2005, 11:09 AM

Yahoo seems to a lot of weight to on-page SEO.

Has anyone noticed the amount of search engines that are using the same algo as Yahoo at present?

**tonytriana** · 01-20-2005, 05:47 PM

what is "robot text file"

**Jamesanderson** · 05:18 PM

A robot text file is a seperate file you can add to your site that instructs what pages/images etc (or not) a robot can index. The robot (search engine programs with the sole purpose of finding sites/pages and passing the infomation back to the search engine index) will find the file and "should" obey.

Reading back through my post I can see why someone may have thought I was doing some selfless promoting (if only I did work for the likes of web pro news). The point I was trying to make was including longditude and latitude to inform search engines the location of your company. I still think it would look quite odd to anyone viewing and haven't done any testing to determine if it actualy works but at the same time it does make sense How can a search engine determine a specific region you may be focused on if there is more than one town or city with the same name. Using an IP location look up could help but how many people do you know hosting their sites in the same town or city?

If I was to build a search engine (yea, like I could take on likes of MSN or Google) I could see that including an algo of such could really help, especialy now search is becoming more localised and searchers are not content with sifting through localy unrelevant search terms and lets face, thats what you get quite often. It could be quite simple to encourage webmasters to include a long/lat refrence on a contact page or even more simple just create a new META tag!

Anyone else with any thoughts

**TaylorAtCTS** · 01-21-2005, 05:53 PM

I love site pro news

**kline11** · 01-22-2005, 05:04 PM

I agree, this has all been written before and following this information will help with most search engines. The fact is, every site can't be on page one of the SE's, so I am just grateful when my site is for some keyword phrases.