Like Google, Yahoo! has its origins in Stanford.

Originally named 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', Yahoo! originators David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D., candidates in Electrical Engineering, started their guide in February 1994 as a way to keep track of lists of favourite Internet links. It wasn't long before Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy. They broke them out into categories. When the categories became too difficult to handle, they developed subcategories ... and so the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide and Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the autumn of 1994, representing almost 100 thousand unique visitors.

Seeing the potential of the directory, Filo and Yang incorporated the business in March 1995, and met with numerous Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital, investors in Apple, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems, agreed to fund Yahoo! in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

After developing a highly experienced and qualified management team, they secured a second round of funding in the autumn of 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

For many years they outsourced their search service to other providers including Google, considering it secondary to their directory and other content features. By the end of 2002 they began to appreciate the importance and value of core algorithmic search products, and started aggressively acquiring search companies.

Overture purchased AllTheWeb and AltaVista in 2003. Yahoo! purchased Inktomi in December 2002, and then consumed Overture in July 2003. The algorithm is based on that of Inktomi which Yahoo! purchased as part of their plan to stop serving Google search returns in favour of their own in-house technology in February 2004.

Today, Yahoo! Inc. is regarded as the second biggest of the three major engines - second to the extent that it was forced to lay off 1000 employees in early 2008 due to its inability to effectively compete with Google. Yahoo! includes an enormous network of websites with the domain yahoo.com attracting in excess of 1.575 billion visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study. The global network of Yahoo! websites including recent acquisitions such as Flickr, social bookmark site del.icio.us, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! Movies, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! Games received 3.4 billion page views per day on average as of October 2007. It is the second most visited website in the U.S., and the most visited website in the world.

As the first online navigational guide to the Web, www.yahoo.com claims to be the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. It also claims to be the number one Internet brand globally with the largest audience reach. Standings that Google would be quick to dispute.

Yahoo! provides online business and enterprise services including Corporate Yahoo!, an enterprise portal solution; audio and video streaming; store hosting and management; and Web site tools and services.

To optimise and rank highly on Yahoo!, as is the case with any of the major search engines, it is important to address specific areas. The major areas of interest when considering optimising for Yahoo! are as follows:

• Keywords and Keyword Density
• Site structure
• Backlinks
• Aging

Keywords and Keyword Density

Keyword density is dynamic depending on Yahoo's criteria at any one moment in time. Optimal keyword densities are no longer a one-size-fits-all calculation. Your industry and site-type will affect the optimal densities, making complete analysis necessary.

What matters as much if not more than attempting to second guess the keyword component of the algorithm is to carefully construct your campaign around clearly defined objectives, identifying keywords and keyword phrases accordingly - your semantic space. What's more, your keywords need to be integrated into high quality, meaningful copy, compelling and rewarding for visitors. The value of your site is largely dependent upon the quality of the content.

Site Structure

On no other engine is site structure more important than on Yahoo!. Standard on-page SEO is absolutely fine (title tags with keywords, h1 for heading, static url, proper internal link structure, sitemap, deep content, article content focusing on the search tail and funnel pagerank back up to category pages).

The site structure determines the order in which your page content is seen by the search engine spiders and consequently which content will be given the highest priority. Content code found higher up in the code of your page is given a higher weight than content lower down in the code. Second, a properly structured site will be coded more elegantly through the use of CSS, reduced or eliminated table use or other programming techniques. Reduced amounts of code pushes the content higher up the page, giving it more weight as far as a search engine is concerned.

Backlinks

Obtain relevant links from high authority pages and directories as soon as possible for both new and old sites. Back linking is the golden rule and the key to building search engine authority. It is also the hardest part of SEO for many organisations. Theme relevance is very important, as is the quality, age and spread of links you attract.

Like all the major engines, the position of your link on the page is important. A link at or near the bottom of the page is less valuable than a link nearer to the top. Also, if your link is on a page with other links, the effect that link will have on your rankings decreases respective to the number of links on the linking page.

The anchor text used to link to your site will help reinforce that the keywords in that anchor text are associated with your site/page.

Ageing

Domain ageing is becoming a solid way of determining a site's long term value and quality score. It is just one of many (100+ factors), but it's becoming increasingly important. New sites and links are not given the same weight as sites and links that have been around for a while. The ageing delay on sites has been extended over the past couple of years. However, it isn't as severe as that imposed by Google. New sites can expect to find it extremely difficult to rank for competitive phrase inside of six months, even if everything else is in place.

At SEO Consult we use our intimate operational knowledge of Yahoo! to apply our expertise and experience in achieving rewarding directory entries and search results for our clients. Contact us today to see how we can get your website to the top of Yahoo! and the other major search engines.