October 9, 2006 When optimizing a site, we are faced with many daunting tasks. It’s hard enough to generally optimize a page for «the search engines.» But when we say «the search engine,» what are we talking about. Obviously Google, Yahoo!, and MSN carry many differences, so optimizing for one would not necessarily yield results in another. So what do each of these main players in the search engine business care about most? Google Google gives some consideration to content, meaning that your site should provide a good amount of information. Keyword stuffing is quite useless in this case, as the Google crawler doesn’t even look at keywords. The biggest thing with Google is to be sure you aren’t using any «black hat» methods like hidden text. They seem to be the best at finding and penalizing for these methods. The next biggest thing is link popularity. Google gives so much consideration to this, that webmasters all over the world are complaining about the lack of real relevance when searching on Google. To be honest, Google gives such a low consideration to the meta tags, that I am wondering why I mention them in a consultation. But then I remember that there are indeed other search engines. MSN MSN places a very large emphasis on the description tag. If that is well written and relevant to the site, you can almost count on MSN’s love. The give next priority to the title tag and content on the site. They don’t seem to be as concerned with link popularity as Google, which is actually why, in my opinion, MSN returns better results when searching. (I can’t believe I just plugged a Micro$oft product, but it’s true) Yahoo! Well, now we come to something that may be changing quite a bit. A month ago I could say that Yahoo! places most of it’s consideration on the Title tag, then on the content of the page. But there are reports that they will be moving towards the link popularity idea. There are even more reports that they will be giving consideration to only relevant and worthy links, so that will make it a little better than Google, but I really don’t know how much consideration it will be getting. In the mean time, we will stick with the idea that title is most important, followed by the content on the site and good use of the title tag. Synopsis In Order of importance. Google * Link Popularity * Content * Readability MSN * Description * Content with good use of the description Yahoo! * Title tag * Content with good use of the title words * May be giving more emphasis on link popularity All in all, we should be optimizing for every search engine. Sure, Google sees a lot of traffic, but closing 2 other doors of substantial opportunity just to keep one open is silly. Besides, there isn’t really anything that one search engine would require that would hamper rankings in another, so there is no reason not to consider all of them.

I hope this helps to clear up a lot of questions. Everyone has their search engine preference so this should help answer some of those questions.

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