Yahoo!'s New Search Engine - How to Optimize for Yahoo Search

Just before the launch of Yahoo Search, rumors started appearing on the renaming of the new spider. It is official now - it is called Yahoo Slurp and you can see its visits in your web server log file like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp)

Yahoo! Slurp will continue to follow the Robot Exclusion Standard, so as long as you have your robots.txt file valid, you should be fine.

For more information on the new Yahoo spider, see http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/.

What are the Yahoo's site submission guidelines?

Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing. If pages already in the Yahoo! Search index link to your site, it will be considered for inclusion in the next update of the index.

Not surprisingly, getting your site listed in major directory services such as the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ is an excellent way to be sure that there are links to your site.

What is different in Yahoo-optimization from Google-optimization?

Careful selection of keywords, incoming links, title tags, header and keyword-rich content are of course going to be as important to Yahoo as they are to Google.

Yahoo cares about page descriptions. Google usually composes its own page description based on the text of the first paragraph of the indexed page. Yahoo wants you to have a unique page description and you should diligently follow their advice.

Specifically, Yahoo advises:

“Use a "description" meta-tag and write your description accurately and carefully. After the title, the description is the most important draw for users. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user but also fit the content on your site.

Use a "keyword" meta-tag to list key words for the document. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your site instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page.