Search engines use a secret algorithm, a set of rule-based actions, to determine the most relevant webpages (or other content) to return in response to a search query. Generally, the higher you rank in the search results for these terms, the more traffic you’ll attract to your website.

Search engine optimization or SEO is about getting your website to the top ranks in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing for specific keyword phrases related to your nonprofit’s services, events, issues, etc. In other words, the goal of SEO is to align your website with the search engine’s algorithm as best as possible in order to increase the probability of your site appearing in the search results for pertinent keyword searches. Top rankings can be accomplished by changing the structure, code, and content of your website in ways that facilitate search engines in discovering all the pages on your site and give it a clearer understanding of what your website is all about. SEO also seeks to increase the number of other sites linking to your website as this is an important factor search engines use in determining your rankings for keywords. Lastly, SEO is a long term online marketing strategy and it may take several weeks to see the payoff, but the return-on-investment can be very high. Below is an example of SEO at work for Amnesty International for the keyword “arms trade”.

SEO is designed to increase the volume and quality of organic traffic coming into your website.

The Opportunity for Nonprofits:

Search engines do not charge a fee to list your website among organic search results, so this is a great opportunity for nonprofit organizations to expand their reach online.

Many search engines incorporate images, videos, press releases, books and shopping feeds in their search results which may represent a tremendous opportunity to create an engaging user experience for your nonprofit within the search engine results.

How to get started:

1. Identify keywords that are related to your nonprofit using the Google Keyword Tool.

2. Assign a keyword to each page on your website. You will optimize the page for this keyword.

3. Add the keyword to the title tag, meta description tag, meta keyword tag, header tag, alt attributes, main site navigation, and URL to its respective allocated page when feasible, being careful not to overdo it and sacrifice user experience.

4. As best as possible, incorporate each keyword into the main body of content of its assigned webpage. The main page content should have between 300 – 500 words of copy.

5. Ask partners, donors, and members to link from their website to your nonprofit site using the keywords you selected as link text. Identify blogs, forums, and website directories and install links to your site using your keywords as link text according to any stated guidelines. In some cases, you may want to send a friendly email to the owner of related websites politely requesting a link to your site.

Are You A Nonprofit Organizations Who Wants To Know More About Internet Marketing?

The proceeding was an excerpt from A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit.  This is my FREE 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts.  Download it instantly by clicking the button below.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there.  If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

  You’ve decided what your blog is about and you’ve written your blog’s mission statement.  Now it’s time for the fun part – reserving a domain name (also called website name) for your blog.  A domain name is the address of your website on the World Wide Web.  It’s how users will find your website.  For example, digitalsapien.com is the domain name for this website. 
“Reserving a domain name” refers to the process of declaring your ownership of a website domain name through a domain registrar such as 1&1 Internet or www.GoDaddy.com .  It’s actually a relatively simple and cheap ($7 – $15) process to reserve your own domain name depending on the domain registrar and top-level domain (TLD) name you select (we’ll discuss TLDs later).  For the lowest affordable rates, we strongly recommend using 1&1 Internet or www.GoDaddy.com to register your domain.

Why is picking the right domain name for your blog important?

Not only does a domain name tell users how to access your blog, but a domain name give your website an identity and helps you to establish a brand on the Web.  Your domain name will have an impact on your blog’s search engine optimization strategy, the implications of which we will discuss later.  Lastly, a competitive domain name can have value.  It’s not uncommon to hear domain names being sold at auction for $5000.  So it’s in your best interest to spend a little time thinking about the domain name for your blog.

What is a top-level domain name?

Digitalsapien.com is the domain name of this website.  The “.com” in this example is referred to as the “top-level domain” (TLD).  Common top-level domain names include .com, .net, .us, .org, .info, .biz, .name.  Please note: that yourwebsite.com and yourwebsite.org are two completely different website names and will require two different registrations.

Top-level domain names can give some indication about who owns the website or what the site is about.  Here are some common TLDs for blogs and their traditional usage.

You will have to select both a combination of a domain name and a top-level domain name for your website.  If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t be.  You’re already half way through your crash course in domain name registration for blogs.

Blog domain name ideas

There are many pointers to go about selecting a domain name for your website.  Here are a few of the most popular ways:

Here are some more tips for selecting a domain name:

• Avoid using dashes in your domain name.  For example, you should reserve financeblog.com over finance-blog.com when possible.  This is a preference, not a hard and fast rule.
• Avoid registering domains that are more than 5 words long as they tend to be less memorable to users.  For example, thisdomainiswaytoolengthy.com isn’t the best choice.
• Use keywords in your domain name when possible.
• Registering a .biz top-level domain name is not recommended.
• Big companies are protective of their trademark, so avoid registering domain names that sound like another companies website name.  For example, do not register ebayy.com.

Search engine optimization (SEO) considerations for domain name selection

  Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo are able to read the keywords in website domain names.  Many use keywords in domain names in order to rank websites relevant to a user’s search.  Search engines also use domain names to as cues to understand the topic of the site.  Again, this helps them to present better results to their searchers.  Therefore, incorporating keywords into your domain name can benefit your search engine rankings, help you to attract people who are interested in your blog topic, as well as your search engine referred traffic.

Let’s say a person goes to Google and searches for “blogs about cars” and there are two (there are really millions, but for this example we will say two) possible websites to return as the top result.  The domain for one website is carblogs.com and the other potential website is airportcarrentals.com – both competing for the #1 position on Google.  All things being equal otherwise, carblogs.com is more likely to be in the #1 position than airportcarrentals.com because the keywords in it’s domain more closely mirrors the user’s search query.

Go ahead and reserve a blog domain name!

Take a few minutes and generate a list of possible domain names for your blog.  Done?  Good!  Now use the domain availability tool below to see if the domain names on your list are available.  Don’t get discouraged if the domain name for your blog has already been reserved, there’s still plenty of really good domain names still left.  Use this super handy tool to register a domain name for your website.

  Today, we are going to discuss search engine optimizations or SEO.  We’ll briefly cover what it is and why your blog needs it.  This post is only an introduction to SEO, we’ll get into more advanced techniques in subsequent posts.

What is search engine optimization?

To understand search engine optimization, one must first understand what a search engine is.  Chances are, you found this blog by typing “seo sem ecommerce” into the Google search bar.  Hopefully, Digitalsapien.com was one of the top results for this search.  You then clicked on the search engine listing and found yourself here.  Google is a search engine.  Search engines are tools that find and index documents (usually web pages, but may also include PDFs, images, etc) on the World Wide Web in order to help a user locate the information they are looking for.  Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask are four of the word’s best known search engines. In brief, search engine optimization is a branch of online search marketing in which marketers attempt to influence the factors that search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) use to rank results in response to a user’s search query in order to drive targeted traffic to their website.  In order words, the goal of search engine optimization is to get a website as close to top of the Google results as possible for a relevant body of keywords.  Because it is a discipline within marketing, search engine optimization is both an art and science.  Search engine optimization is not to be confused with paid search advertising (also called PPC, pay-per-click).  Paid search advertising is exactly as it sounds – website marketers pay search engine to post an for a keyword in the search results.  We may address paid search advertising and how to use it to market your blog at a later date. The graphic below shows how Google displays paid advertisements and natural (or “organic”) search listings.

Search Engine Optimization and Blogs

Blogs are a type of website.  As search engines are a huge source of free traffic, generally all website (including blogs) should employ at least the bare minimal SEO tactics.  For many, “natural search referred traffic” (traffic that comes from a search engine’s natural results, not it’s paid advertisements) will provide the largest source of traffic to their blog.

Building a Keyword Strategy

Since search engines depend on users to type in keyword phrases, the backbone of an effective search engine optimization campaign is a well-developed keyword strategy.  You should start by brainstorming a body of keywords that aptly describe your blog topic. For example, let’s say you just set up a blog about making homemade ice cream.  Now it’s time to build your keyword list.  You undoubtedly want your website to rank highly in the SERPs (search engine result page) for the search phrase “making homemade ice cream”, but there are tons of related terms you may want your website to appear for in the search engines.  Here are some keywords you may want your blog about making homemade ice cream to rank for:

• “make homemade ice cream”
• “homemade ice cream”
• “homemade vanilla ice cream”
• “homemade vanilla ice cream recipe”
• “how do you make homemade ice cream”
• “how do you make ice cream at home”
• “how to make homemade ice cream”
• “make homeade ice cream (*note the common misspelling)”
• “making homemade ice cream”

Of course you want to select keywords that searchers actually use to search for the information you offer on your blog.  The Google Keyword Tool is a great free keyword discovery application.  The Google Keyword Tool aids you in in finding new keywords by:

1. Scanning your websites and suggesting a body of appropriate keywords
2. Multiplying your list of keywords quickly by recommending other related keywords
3. Offering estimated search frequencies

I’d highly recommend conducting a round of keyword research using the Google Keyword Discovery Tool and assembling a list of 20 – 50 keyword phrases related to the topic of you website.

Adding Keywords To Your Blog

You’ve completed your initial keyword research, so what’s next?  Next you want to do the following:

• Place 1 – 2 of your keywords in the title tag (<title>) of your blog posts
• Use 1 at least 1 keyword in the URL of each of your pages
• Use 1 – 2 keywords in the header tags (<h1> – <h6>) of your blog posts
• Sprinkle your keywords throughout the copy of your post, being careful to maintain the readability of your entry.
• Use 2 – 3 keywords in your Meta Description tag to create an inviting search engine listing
• Use 1 – 2 keywords in the Alt Attribute for important images featured on your blog
• For keywords used in the copy of your blog post, link them to other blog posts you have already written – just make sure the keyword you are using as anchor text is appropriate to the post your are linking to.  As a loose guideline, create one in-copy for each 150 – 200 words in your post.
  • For example, if your post is 600 words long, create 3 – 4 in-copy links to other posts on your website using keywords as anchor text.

Adding keywords to your blog content and to these HTML elements helps search engines determine what your blog is about.  Once a search engine associates your blog with a targeted body of keyword phrases, it is more likely to present your blog on the search engine result page when a person incorporates them in a Google (or other search engine) search query.

On-site Factors and Off-site SEO Factors

Search engine optimization involves more than simply adding keywords to page copy and source code.  There are is a rather lengthy list of additional factors that search engines consider.  Early, I mentioned factors that influence search results.  These factors can be divided into two categories: on-page and off-page.  We’ll address how to optimize for specific on-site and off-site factors in later posts, but for now here’s a high level overview:

On-site SEO Factors

On-site SEO factors are those criteria on your website that you, as the website administrator, have direct control over.  On-site SEO factors consists of things like content, how your pages are linked together, keyword usage, and server codes.

Off-site SEO Factors

Conversely, off-site factors are things that influence your search engine rankings that you cannot control directly.  Off-site factors include things such as external links to your website, characteristics of your competition’s website, and the behavior of the searcher.

SEO Resources

If you would like to learn more about search engine optimization, here are some resources to check out:

• Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (pdf)
• Google Webmaster Guidelines
• Google Webmaster Central Blog
• Google Basics – How Google Works
• SEO Fast Start
• SEO Book by Aaron Wall
• SEOMoz

Download the Internet Marketing Guide for Nonprofits in PDF format

Today, as an accompaniment to the start of New England’s GiveCamp weekend in which I will be participating, I am releasing A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing: Cost-Effective Opportunities to Accelerate Online Marketing Success for Your Nonprofit. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing contains information about:

• Why nonprofits should consider Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
• A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
• Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
• Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style
• Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies

The guide is totally free, but if you like it kindly donate to any of the charities that will be present at New England GiveCamp. Here’s the list of nonprofits scheduled to attend the event.

Also, if you know a nonprofit or charity that can use this guide, please feel free to share a copy of it with them or refer them to this site.

If you have any questions about the content of this document, please feel free to comment to this post and I reply there. If you are looking to retain my services for any of the online marketing programs mentioned, please use this form to contact me.

If you are an Amazon Affiliate using Associate-O-Matic (commonly abbreviated AOM) – You Need This FREE Script

Associate-O-Matic is without a doubt one of the best Amazon affiliate store creation platforms available.  And After you factor in the price of it – $99 to start plus $20 yearly license renewal – then it beats all other competitors hands down.  Despite this, the AOM has a few search engine optimization (SEO) issues that I, as a professional SEO, find extremely difficult to overlook.

SEO Restriction & Associate-O-Matic

As far as I am concerned, the biggest of AOM’s SEO restrictions are that it does not allow users to assign specify title and Meta tags to any site pages.  What AOM does provide is a programmatic solution which allows a user to create template based Meta tags.  Many ecommerce site with thousands of SKU’s use formulaic Meta tags, which in many cases is the only real way to ensure that each page has its own unique title and Meta tag.  But because Meta tag automation is formulated, the output of these pages is limited.  So if you want to optimize the title tag of an individual page for a single competitive regimen term, then automated tagging solutions may not get the job done.  This is the problem that I kept running into with AOM.

Plus, between all the category pages, numerous shorting options, and tons of URL parameters AOM creates a lot of duplicated pages on your site.  Yes, AOM does allow the user to add the nofollow link attribute to prevent the search engines from assigning search equity to duplicated pages, but generally using the nofollow link attribute in this manner is deprecated.   There are much better ways of doing this – namely by using the “no index, no follow” and canonical Meta tags.  My script enables you to specify a canonical URL and to block spiders from crawling duplicate pages within AOM.

The FREE Associate-O-Matic Meta Tag Script

Faced with these problems, I decided to create an AOM add-on script that would give me some closure as an SEO purist.  This script essentially replaces the content within the tag with your own data for any AOM page that you specify.  You can see the script in action here.  Here are some of the features of The Free Associate-O-Matic Meta Tag Script:

• Specify Title and Meta Tags for ANY AOM page!
• Easy installation.  Just change few settings in the script, FTP it to your site and toggle one setting in the AOM console and you’re up in running.
• Gets the job done in the easiest way possible. No database required.  Written in PHP and very easy to customize if you desire.
• Lazy man technical support.  Ask a question in the comment section of the post and I’ll provide an answer when I can.
• Free.  No charge for something that can dramatically boost Google traffic to your Associate-O-Matic Amazon Affiliate website.

Installation

1.  Click here to download the FREE Associate-O-Matic Meta Tag Script script.

2.  Open the file called get_meta.php with a text editor like Textpad.

3.  Under where it says, “” place any links to external files that you may need.  I have added some placeholders already for you.  This might include externally referenced JavaScript files and CSS files.

4.  FTP the file called get_meta.php to the root directory of your site.

5.  Go to the Admin console in Associate-O-Matic.  Make your way to Settings –>Site.  Once here, populate the Site Header field with “get_meta.php”, then click “Save All Settings”.  AOM will now check to see if you have specified Meta data for a URL before creating the page.

6.  Open and edit the metatags.txt file in a text editor.  This is the file where you will assign unique Meta Data to any page on your site.

7.  For each URL you wish to customize the Meta data for, you must supply 5 pieces of information – title tag, description meta tag, keyword meta tag, canonical meta tag, and robots meta tag.  You must use a pipe (“|”) to separate each field in the format:

*URL of page to change|Your Title Tag|Your Meta Keyword Tag|Your Meta Description Tag|Your Canonical Tag|Robots Index Tag

IMPORTANT:

*Use relative URLs to specify the page you want to add custom Meta information to.
*All data pertaining to a URL should go on the same line.  Start a new line for each URL.

Example:

shop.php|Home Office Supplies, Office Furniture, Office Computers – TheHomeOfficeDepot.com|home office furniture desk, office supplies, home office furniture, wholesale office supplies|The HomeOffice Depot is a one stop source for discount office supplies, office electronics, & office furniture for the homeoffice so you can get work done|http://www.thehomeofficedepot.com/|index, follow

8. Save the changes to metatags.txt and upload it to the root directory of your site.

9. Go to the URL you specified custom data for and test it out.

This Script Is Link-ware

This script is free, but if you like it please shoot me back a link.  Also, feel free to tell others about it in any place online that discuss Associate-O-Matic, The Amazon Affiliate Program, and creating dynamic Meta data.

Here’s a questions from my friend Diana at Ustandout.com, a great site that offers social media and internet marketing tips.  She had just migrated her blog from an IIS server to a Linux box.  In doing so, she had to change the URL structure of her site, which caused an important inbound link to Ustandout.com to break.

Question:

“Originally, my blog was hosted on my dad’s IIS server, and the links all read http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name. After transferring the blog to a linux server, we created an .htaccess file to redirect all http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name to http://ustandout.com/blog-post-name.

Over the weekend, I transferred my U Stand Out blog from my dad’s server to my own GoDaddy-hosted linux server (I figured it was time to take control of my own hosting, haha). The .htaccess file is still there. However, external sites linking to my blog via the original link (/index.php/blog-post-name) no longer work.

As an example, Mashable was linking to one of my blog posts: http://ustandout.com/twitter/free-twitter-badges, but their link reads http://ustandout.com/index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges, so it doesn’t work. I was getting tons of traffic from this one mention, and now I’m not.

So I know you have experience with redirects, and I just don’t know enough about this kind of thing to research and find a solution (trust me, I’ve tried, and I broke my whole site for a while haha). Do you have any idea how I can make /index.php/blog-post-name redirect to /blog-post? Any help would be much appreciated, but if you’re too busy to think about this I understand!!

Diana”

My Reply:

“Diana, As far as your question goes – here are my thoughts:

If I’m understanding you correctly, it seems like you implemented a general redirect rule using regular expressions in your .htaccess file that only works for a specific URL format. It only redirects all http://ustandout.com/index.php/blog-post-name to http://ustandout.com/blog-post-name.

The link from Mashable also links to you /twitter/ directory which doesn’t seem to be covered by your existing 301 redirect rules. I’d recommend creating a custom 301 redirect rules that works specifically on the URL that is linked to from Mashable. In other words, try adding this:

redirect 301 /index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges http://ustandout.com/index.php/twitter/free-twitter-badges

But assuming this works, it doesn’t solve your problem site-wide. So, if you send my your .htaccess file maybe I can take a look at it.

Be well,
Everett”

Follow Up

Diana added the line of code to her .htaccess file and it solved the problem.  Issue resolved.

Have A Questions?

If anyone out there has any questions, SEO-related or otherwise, please shoot me a line and I will do my best to help you.

Leafing through the pages of the latest issue of DMNews, I saw an interesting article that got me thinking about the role of superlative keywords (i.e. “best” , “greatest”, “most exciting”) in search engine optimization for ecommerce websites.  Customer reviews have become an integral part of the online shopping experience.  Reviews provide potential buyers with more information about the e-store’s merchandise and can grow the customer’s trust in the transaction.  Most major online retailers allow customers to submit product reviews.  Amazon.com and Walmart.com are two online retailers that probably house the largest base of buyer reviews on the web.

Intent of the Superlative Search

The superlative search engine query provides a lot of insights about the user’s intent.  For example,  the query “best seafood restaurant in Massachusetts” can imply the following:

• the searcher is likely planning to go to an eatery in the near future.
• the searcher is likely seeking the advice of other seafood eaters, food critics, or from the restaurants themselves in selecting a restaurant.
• the searcher could be seeking information on how to evaluate a seafood restaurant.
• the searcher is likely looking for only one restaurant, the best restaurant.
• the searcher is looking for information which may be subjective or qualitative.

My conclusion about the superlative search is that it is innately a social query.  In other words, people are using search engines to find opinions written by past purchasers, presumably to act on the information they find at a future point.  This is different than a basic informational search.  For example, had the user typed the phrase “seafood restaurants in Massachusetts” (without the superlative) we could conclude that a simple list of Massachusetts restaurants could suffice as response.  The second conclusion is that the the superlative query has both an explicit informational component and a prominent, but implicit action component.  The user is looking for information that will help him or her do something.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, it may not simply be enough to have a website that ranks algorithmically if the searcher includes a quality modifier.  You’ll get a click, sure, but will you get the user’s patronage without third party confirmation?  Unlikely.  The fact is that the searcher is not expressly looking for information about your product; the user is searching for the opinions of others regarding the merchandise or services you offer.  Furthermore, the self-declared best of something must be supported by another party for the assertion to be meaningful.  This is where hosted user evaluations (such as the ones on Amazon.com) and review websites such as Yelp intercede.

Hosted Product Reviews and Search Engine Optimization

The problem with using superlative adjectives on ecommerce website is that they cannot be integrated into product descriptions without compromising the objectivity of the narrative users must read in order to understand the product offering.  Product descriptions are intended to tell the shopper what the product is, how to use it, and present technical specifications.  Product descriptions are much more important online because the user does not always have direct access to the product or service to inspect first hand.  So, using words like “best” and “greatest” demote the objectiveness of the product description and can often sound like unsubstantiated salesman speak.  How confusing would it be for buyers if every product description found in an online store used the word “best”?

This is why many online retailers capture and display customer comments next to product descriptions.  A glowing review from a satisfied customer is worth much more to a user and to the bottom line of a website than an evangelical product description.  Additionally, review pages can give a website a boost in search engine standings.  Superlative phrases in comments left by past customers can help increase the website’s ranking for queries containing quality modifiers.  In this way, creating good products, providing timely delivery, and offering great customer service can aid in the SEO of a website.  Thus, online shopkeepers should leave the singing of praises to their customers, and instead focus on making sure the search engine spiders have a path to find user reviews on their website.

Review Websites and Search Engine Optimization

Yelp and Epinions are two popular review websites.  Review websites, in addition to providing unbiased (in theory, but not always in practice) reviews, are also crucial components of online reputation management.  Customer opinion websites can cosign any claims of positive superlatives made by sites promoting a product or service.  There exists an interesting relationship between search marketing and online customer review aggregators – although a listing in the search results for an opinion website may initially attract a user’s click for a superlative search, they are unlikely to be the user’s final destination because these types of websites do not resolve the implicit action component of the superlative query.  After reading the opinions others have posted on the website, the user is likely to go to another location to act on the information they have obtained even if it is at a much later time.  To resolve the action component the information seeker may then look for information about the company or product encountered on a review website using a search engine or by navigating to the website directly.  In some ways, a good user review can be as valuable as a direct link from a review forum both in terms of providing referral traffic or by leading a user to conduct a search for information about your business, resulting in an increase in your website’s natural traffic volume.

Yesterday, Overdrive Interactive, an SEO firm in Boston, released its highly anticipated 2009 Search Marketing Map.  The Search Marketing Map is in the same spirit of Overdrive’s Social Media Map, which caused a buzz in the Web 2.0 landscape a few months prior.  Jump over to http://www.ovrdrv.com/search-map/ and download this free resource today!

Any website optimizer who has been in the game for a while knows that in order to keep up with changes in search marketing you’ve got to examine Google under a microscope, memorize the gospel according to Matt Cutts, and stay up to date with all the cool new Google tools.  That’s just what a good search engine optimizer has to do.  Although Google is the most prolific search engine on the web, responsible for 55% of all searches, there’s another player in the game that I feel doesn’t get it’s fair share of love from the SEO community. 

Enter Yahoo – The Scottie Pippen of search engines.  Yahoo is responsible from somewhere between 20% – 25% of web searches depending on who is holding the stat book, and despite the fact that it doesn’t have as dominant of a market share as Google, owning 1 out of every 5 online searches is a helluva lotta searches.

That being said, today I will give Yahoo its long overdue respect by sharing some tips and idiosyncrasies for working with Yahoo:

1.  Yahoo still uses Meta keyword tags.

There was a time (circa 1999) when all a webmaster had to do was throw a bunch of keywords with high search volumes in to the Meta keyword tag and the search engines would eat it up.  No more.  Top tier search engines hate the tag, including Google, but not Yahoo.  According to this article by Danny Sullivan, Yahoo still eats up terms in the Meta keyword tag and uses it in a search query service process called "recall" to some extent.

2.  Yahoo does not display the cache date for pages in its index.

You’ll never know by looking at Yahoo’s cache when Slurp!, Yahoo’s search engine bot,  last visited your site.  Why Yahoo doesn’t display a cache date for the sites it crawls baffles me. Perhaps, Slurp! is a bit more lethargic than Googlebot, and Yahoo wants to keep a tight lid on the limitations of it’s web crawler technology.  And this is a great reason, in my opinion, not to display cache dates.  It reminds me of something MSN should have done when it announced last year that it can now execute keyword stemming functions in order to determine search results.  My reaction to this MSN news: Are you kidding, me?  MSN, you mean you weren’t doing this before?

Eventually Yahoo’s cache get’s dumped into the WayBack Machine where it get’s stored for posterity.  Here, in the WayBack Machine, suddenly the original Yahoo cache date is rediscovered.

A tip to webmasters: if you want to see when Yahoo last cached your site, put a widget that displays the current date and make it either visible only in the HTML code or in the footer of your website (where it isn’t noticeable to your visitors).  This way the "image date" can quickly be determined when you retrieve the copy of your site from Yahoo’s cache.  The date widget should not be dependent on JavaScript, as search engines are not affable toward the scripting language

3.  The "noydir" Meta tag tells Yahoo not to form your search listing using the Yahoo directory.

Yahoo may assemble the search engine listing description for pages on your website using a couple of different sources, including the Yahoo Directory.  And who wants their search result descriptions coming from an offsite location?  The solution:  use the "noydir" Meta tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noydir" />

This tag instructs the search engine not to look at the Yahoo Directory when forming search engine listing descriptions.  The only catch is that this Meta tag must be applied to each page on your website.

4.  Yahoo gives webmasters a better idea of the number of inbound links to a website.

a link:www.websitename.com query conducted on both Yahoo and Google will return dramatically different results. Each of the two search engines has different criteria for evaluating the righteousness of an inbound link to a website.  In short, Google will count only what it has determine to be "highly qualified" backlinks to a domain.  On the other hand, Yahoo appears to return all inbound links to a website, regardless of apparent legitimacy.  Use this disparity of reported links to your advantage.  Treat the number of Yahoo links as a best guesstimate for the actual number of inbound links to your site and the Google number to determine the links in your arsenal with the most SEO power.

5.  Yahoo doesn’t care about PageRank.  It has its own way of measuring page popularity called WebRank.

According to Wikipedia, PageRank is Google’s link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents.  PageRank or PR is a Google proprietary algorithm.  But many folks mistakenly believe, that PageRank is some sort of official web standard that measures the link popularity of a page.  It may indeed be considered an informal, de facto web standard because of it’s widespread usage (and ironically it’s misusage), but PageRank doesn’t mean anything to Yahoo.

Yahoo has knocked off Google’s innovations yet again to create WebRank.  WebRank is so overlooked that its Wikipedia article looks like this.  In fact, I seriously doubt that Yahoo WebRank is still included in the latest releases of Yahoo Toolbar, although I could be wrong.  At any rate, the lesson is that Yahoo’s ranking of page popularity isn’t related to PageRank at all- Yahoo has it’s own methods of weighing the importance of a webpage to the Internet.

6.  Like Google, Yahoo maintains a blog aimed at webmasters.

Yahoo shoots some search engine optimization advice to webmasters too on the Yahoo Search Blog.  It isn’t as well known (or as well loved) as the Google Webmaster Central Blog, but I would strongly recommend sucking down the RSS feed for the site "to keep abreast with the second best in the search engine contest".

When I first launched this blog way back in October of 2007, I used to check my Google Analytics, Google Adsense and Feedburner statistics excessively (even though the three services only update every 24 hours).  A little time has passed and I’ve settle into some sort of groove, so I don’t pull the metrics for my site that crazily anymore.

This week, however, as I was scanning my Google Analytics, I noticed a high volume of search traffic coming in through an article I wrote called How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in September 2006.  It was the first meaningful article I really published on this blog, and one reader was so impressed by it that they kindly submitted it to Digg.com on my behalf (BIG THANKS!).  Like any good blog-keeper, I proceeded to investigate why I was getting so much search engine referred traffic to this page.  Well… it turns out that Google ranks this particular article #1 for the phrase "Organic CTR".  All things considered, that’s quite an endorsement from the world’s busiest search engine.  Although there are a few updates I will make to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the future, the basic methodology still holds up despite the Yahoo Keyword Suggestion Tool being put out to pasture.

Because this post is the second most popular entry point on my site next to the homepage, I wanted get a better idea of just how well this article was ranking on Google.  To determine this, I pulled the top referring search terms for this posting from my Google Analytics and did a quick search engine ranking report to determine the article’s depth among Google’s results.  The table below summarizes my findings:

As you can see, this article ranks highly for a variety of variations and concatenations relating to the valuable terms "organic ctr".  I believe the fact that folks are using these keywords to find my blog reflect that my site is doing decent job in attracting the search marketing crowd.  In the end, I just think it’s all just pretty cool.  I plan to write an update to How to Estimate The Organic CTR for Your Website in the coming weeks.  Please stay tuned!

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