With Internet marketing you’ll find that most of your search engine traffic comes from one source, Google. As much as 80% or more of your search traffic can come from Google with the rest being divided up amongst the other search engines, led by Yahoo. This means that optimising your site for, and achieving high rankings in Google is the most important thing to do from an SEO point of view.
Google of course is much harder to SEO for than Yahoo, with results taking longer to achieve. While Google has a complex algorithm that takes many factors into consideration, Yahoo relies on the on page work almost exclusively.
For example, the graph shows the progress achieved in a short couple of weeks for one client in Yahoo with a particular keyphrase. This example is by no means out of the ordinary, as most of the phrases have seen similar jumps.
It should also be pointed out that the website in question was brand new, with no previous rankings to speak of.
With such a short space of time elapsed, the results have been achieved with just a little on page SEO. Sadly, rather than show how great the SEO on the website was, it more highlights how easy Yahoo is to be gamed. As such, the search results in Yahoo aren’t as useful as those within Google, which is why fewer people use it to search.
A major search engine shouldn’t be as easy as this to achieve high rankings, no matter how strong the SEO, which further goes to prove the problems experienced by Yahoo and its search algorithm. Yahoo has been like this for some time, with SEO professionals and SEO companies able to exploit weaknesses in its algorithm to achieve high rankings for clients.
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A site I launched last week is now no.1 for “business mobile” key term.
It has taken 3 months to get on the first page of google for “business mobile contract”.
Yahoo is too easy for SEO… if more people used it I would be a millionaire 🙂
Quite right Richard.
Of course, if more people used Yahoo, more SEO companies would optimise for it and it would become harder to rank for specific search terms within its index.
A sort of chicken and egg thing I guess. Right now though, Google has all the chickens 😉