If you’ve been researching SEO then you will have undoubtedly noticed that the majority of advice and guidelines are geared towards optimising a website for Google. There is very good reason for this – namely, the fact that the vast majority of searches conducted online are done so through Google. Yahoo and MSN are the second and third most popular search engines respectively, though, and when combined they do make up a decent portion of all searches conducted.
Search Engine Algorithms
Each search engine uses different algorithms to rank a web page but ultimately, they all look for similar things in a website. Because they want to promote their own service this means that they attempt to display results that offer high quality content. The differences emerge from the calculations each use to try and ascertain what passes as high quality. They all, however, lean towards a combination of keyword optimised website content and authoritative inbound links.

Google
Good SEO will include factors that are important to all the search engines but most campaigns will track results in Google because it is Google that will usually direct the most traffic to a page. But the fact is that a web page can get a decent level of traffic from other search engines so try to keep data from at least the three major engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
Google places a lot of weight on inbound links, perhaps more so than the other two. They firmly believe that a web page’s quality can be judged by how many authoritative pages provide inbound links to that page. Yahoo and MSN also use these factors but not as much as Google. Another area where Google stands out is in its adoption of semantically related keywords and requirements for a lower keyword density than the other two.
Other Search Engine Optimisation Factors
Yahoo seems to prefer social media based websites, although this has become more prominent for all three of them recently, as the web has become more social in its methods. This means that blogs, social networking sites, and social bookmarking sites can be used as an effective part of a search engine optimization campaign.

Directory Links
Directory links are not believed to be as important to Google as they once were. This is largely because they do not represent an organic “vote” for a web page. They can either gathered for free simply by submitting details and waiting, or they can be bought. Google used to place a lot of weight on DMOZ, the Open Directory Project, links but these links are believed to have been further devalued. Yahoo and MSN still seem to use directories as an indication of a site’s popularity.

SEO And The Search Engines
Search engine optimisation tends to concentrate on Google, because of its undoubted popularity among web users. However, Yahoo and MSN together still make up a reasonable portion of web searches and it would be foolish to completely ignore them. The best SEO campaigns attempt to gain traffic from all three search engines in order to fully take advantage of search engine traffic.

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