Yahoo said it would release the beta version of an API (application programming interface) on Thursday that Web sites can use to build services based on its search infrastructure and algorithms, including the ability to re-rank results and control how they are presented.

A publisher could use the API to build a search service that specializes in a particular topic, such as sports, for example. Or it could use the API to give users a better way to search the content on its Web site — or potentially even to build a rival to Yahoo.

The API is part of what Yahoo calls its BOSS platform, for Build Your Own Search Service. The API will be available to any Web developer, along with tools for combining data from Yahoo’s search indexes with data from other sources on the Web.

In the coming months it will roll out a “monetization platform,” using its advertising system, that will allow Web sites to start generating revenue from the services they build. Yahoo plans to collect a share of the revenue from the sites that use its BOSS platform, said IDC analyst Karsten Weide.

“What Yahoo gets is two things,” she said. “They get a cut of the ad revenue, and secondly it makes those Web sites beholden to Yahoo and not somebody else.”

Rival search company Google already offers a service that allows Web sites to create custom search engines. But Yahoo contended that its BOSS platform will give an “unprecedented level of access” to its technology in a way that will “disrupt the search market,” according to a statement.

Analysts said they don’t expect the new offering to significantly boost Yahoo’s share of the search market, however. “It will help, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not gong to totally turn things upside down. Certainly not in the short term,” Weide said.

Two Web sites have already been using BOSS to offer niche search services. Me.dium is a “social” tool that lets people at different computers search the Web and view Web pages as if they were together, while Hakia offers semantic search.

Those sites are examples of the type of specialized services that have not really taken off because Google continues to dominate all kinds of search, said Evan Andrews, search analyst at Jupiter Research. If other Web sites can take Yahoo’s search technology and improve on it, then Yahoo might see an impact from this offering, he said.

“If they’re able to align themselves with some major partners and collectively bring in traffic and monetize that, then [Yahoo] stands to chip away at market share,” he said.

Yahoo said its service would also allow universities to do research into search engines in a way that they have not been able to before.

The offering continues Yahoo’s Open Strategy announcement earlier this year, when it described a long term plan to be more open with its Web sites, services and applications. Yahoo’s strategy is to “leverage third party contributions to improve their market position and improve their bottom line,” Weide said.

Thursday’s announcement is unlikely to affect Yahoo’s ongoing discussions about a combination with Microsoft. “This has not been designed to annoy Microsoft even more, like the Google search announcement,” Weide said. He was referring to a Yahoo agreement to start running some Google ads on Yahoo sites, a deal that some experts say was made in hopes of fending off a Microsoft acquisition.

Yahoo said the beta API and further details of the new service would be available online Thursday at a new BOSS section of its developer Web site.

Search Engine Optimization is probably the cheapest and most cost effective form of Internet marketing. In fact some studies indicate Search Engine Optimization as being the second most effective marketing strategy. The increasing popularity of Search Engines and the fact that good quality and cost effective traffic can be brought through them to websites has led to the development of a whole industry that revolves around how to make Web pages/Websites more search engine friendly or in other words better optimized. The result of this advent of Search Engine Optimization industry is the feeling among webmasters and novices in the industry that SEO is like rocket science and has to be handled by professionals only. Thankfully, the truth is that anyone can search engine optimize Websites. All it takes to optimize a Web site and get better ranking and traffic are 9 simple steps.

The 9 Simple Steps

1. Select Right Keywords

This is THE most important step and can easily be the reason for your ranking ahead or ranking below your watch sites (competition). Identify the words or phrases using which people search(might search) for your Web page on the Internet. If you sell dog food, your keywords must have something to do with “dog food”. Do not use irrelevant keywords, even if they get you more traffic. If you are not sure of the keywords to be used, use any of the following tools to find good target phrases:

• Overture is a great tool for assessing popularity of target phrases.
• Googleis great for brainstorming target phrases.
• Word Tracker can help you assess popularity and compare how the competitors use the target phrase.

2. Analyze Competition

Determine who your competitors are. It is quite simple; search for the keyword on popular search engines. The sites that show up above your page are your competitors. Analyze those sites and find out how effectively they have used the targeted keywords. Remember that the more popular a target phrase is, the more competition there is likely to be. Sometimes, it makes sense to target a less popular phrase where you can corner the market rather than aiming for the highest popularity phrase.

Check out yours and your competitor’s link popularity. In many engines, you can type: link:http://domain-name and get a link count for that particular site. The more the link count, the better.

3. Page Creation and Optimization

After identifying the keywords, create Web pages by targeting one word or phrase for each page. One common mistake most novice SEO’s do is dump many keywords into a page. Not only does it make it difficult for you to rank high for each of those keywords, but also it makes the page less readable.

i) Make sure your keywords are present in the following places:

• Title tag
• META tags: Description tag and Keywords tag
• Body text: Heading tags, comment tags,alt tags and prominent places on the page content

ii) Conduct HTML validation for your Web pages. HTML validation helps you find out the errors in HTML code, which may prevent search engines from indexing your site.

iii)Then check and ensure that your pages are Spam-free. When your page elements, such as Title tag, META tag, and body text, are stuffed with repeated keywords, search engines may consider them Spam and ban your site.

4. Visual Review of Page

• Check whether your site has usable navigation.
• Ensure you have informative and readable content. Good content will ensure that your page appeals to human visitors as well as spiders.

A badly written page may get a good ranking on search engines, but visitors will move away from your site with the same speed they came in. Although Search engine spiders that grade your site will not look for visual appeal, directory editors and human visitors will!.

5.Link Building

Get inbound links from quality sites. Quality sites are those that rank high on search engines and/or have a good Google PageRank. If the sites are in someway connected with the theme of your webpage that will help increase your rank better. DO NOT turn to link farms for link building this can get your site banned in search engines.

6. Submitting to Search Engines

If you have followed steps one to five you are ready to submit your webpages to the search engines. Chances are the search engines found your webpages through the links that you built but if they some how missed your webpages don’t worry you can always let them know that your pages exist through Search Engine Submission.

You can refer the below link for details on submission to search engines

Altavista

http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl

All The Web
http://www.alltheweb.com/add_url.php

Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

MSN
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm

Yahoo
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/

7. Submitting to Directories

Search Engines consider Web Directories as expert documents. A presence in popular directories can help you get a better ranking on search engines. You can submit your site to popular directories, such as DMOZ, Yahoo!, World Wide Index, and Microsoft bCentral. For more information on Web Directories and guidelines for submission.

8. Maintain

Search Engine Optimization is a continuous process. Popular Search Engines keep making changes to their algorithms i.e the way they rank webpages quite often. Thus it is imperative that you continually optimize your pages based on the current algorithms to achieve high ranks.
It’s important to measure your rankings atleast monthly. Re-optimize any pages that drop in rank and then re-submit or wait for the search engine to revisit the page.

9. Tracking

Ultimately, it is not top rankings you are really after, but more traffic and sales. High traffic is not something that automatically follows top rankings. It is something you get by ranking high for “good keywords”. Thus it is important that you track your website usage using a good log file analysis program and find out which keywords and which keywords bring in most visitors to your pages. Use this information to optimize your pages better for these terms and search engines.

Conclusion

At first glance, search engine optimization may look like magic; but actually all it takes is 9 simple steps. Search Engine Optimization is a simple continuous process that helps search engine do their job more efficiently. It does take a lot of time and patience but stay the course search engine optimization pays for itself in increased revenue. It is worth the time and trouble.

If you follow all the above-listed steps, you will definitely see an improvement in the search engine rankings for your keywords. The best part is that you do not have to spend any money on the expensive search engine optimizers!

According to a recent study, of all the searches done through search engines, around 25% of searches are done through Yahoo. That means, if your site is not coming up on Yahoo, you lose 25 percent of your potential visitors. Until February 2004, Yahoo used Google results. So, optimizing for Google was enough to get a top rank on Yahoo. As of 17th February 2004, Yahoo dropped Google results and instead showed search results using Inktomi algorithm. Yahoo’s shift from Google to Inktomi made optimizing for Yahoo inevitable.

The New Yahoo Search Engine

Although Inktomi / Yahoo search algorithm doesn’t differ too much from that of Google’s, it is not exactly a clone of Google’s algorithm. Based on the search results on Yahoo, it seems Yahoo’s new algorithm gives much importance to keyword density in body text, Title tag, and META tags and to inbound links. Therefore, concentrating on these two items will definitely increase your site’s ranking on Yahoo.

Keyword Density

The new Yahoo search engine gives more importance to keyword density. A Website with high keyword density may fare well in Yahoo. The average keyword counts that seem to work are as follows:

• Title Tag – 15% to 20%: Yahoo displays the title tag content in its result page. Therefore, write the title as a readable sentence. A catchy title will attract the reader to come to your Website.
• Body Text – 3%: Boldfacing the keywords sometimes boosts the page’s ranking. But, be careful not to be awkward to the readers. Too much of boldfaced content irritates readers.
• META Tags – 3%: In META description and Keyword tags, provide important keywords at the beginning. Do not use the keywords repeatedly in the Keyword tag, because Yahoo may consider it Spamming. Write the description tag as a readable sentence.

Inbound Links/Back Links

Yahoo considers inbound links highly important. Inbound links are the links from other sites pointing to your site. Having considerable links, with appropriate link texts, from quality sites increases your site’s ranking in Yahoo.

Static Pages versus Dynamic Pages

Like most other search engines Yahoo prefers static pages to dynamic pages. Sometimes, Yahoo may fail to index dynamic pages. Therefore, consider the following tips to ensure that Yahoo indexes all your web pages:

• Have static pages with keyword-rich content; it increases the rank of your site on Yahoo
• If you have some important dynamic pages, prepare a site map or quick links section with links to all the Web pages. This would help the Yahoo spider to craw all your pages.

Frames

Most of the search engines, Yahoo in particular, hate frames. Avoid using frames on your site, because Yahoo spider finds it difficult to crawl them.

The sure-shot solution to rank high on yahoo is simply getting plenty of back links from quality sites, and then having copious keywords in the body text, title, META, and alt tags. As Yahoo holds the 25% share of the Internet searches, it is prudent to have your Web pages optimized for Yahoo. When your Web page ranks high on Yahoo, you get additional traffic that will convert into increased sales.

Vincent S Brown – 1st September 2005

Internet Marketing by Gatesix

While in case of MTNL it is for Yahoo! oneSearch, the mobile search engine, in the case of Idea Cellular, the partnership is for mobile advertising.

The Sunnyvale, California based company on Tuesday announced several new mobile initiatives for the Asia Pacific region, including five new Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships with leading mobile operators including MTNL, Hong Kong CSL Limited (CSL), Smart Communications Inc (Smart, Philippines), Digital Mobile Phlis, Inc (SUN Cellular, Philippines) and Vibo Telecom Inc (Vibo, Taiwan).

It has also forged strategic mobile advertising partnerships with Idea Cellular Ltd and Maxis Communications Bhd (Malaysia), the company said in a statement distributed via Businesswire.

Yahoo! also announced localised versions of Yahoo! Go 3.0 for India, Australia and Southeast Asia, including a local language version for Indonesia, and an English version of Yahoo! oneSearch with voice that recognises regional accents.

The company also announced the launch of new mobile widgets for the Asia Pacific region including Yahoo! Cricket, Yahoo! Answers and Showtimes (Yahoo! India Movies), as well as a MTV Asia mobile widget featuring news updates and music charts.

These announcements further demonstrate Yahoo!’s global momentum and unveil the next phase of the company’s mobile strategy for the Asia Pacific region, said the release.

Today’s Yahoo! oneSearch partnerships announcement brings the total number of mobile search deals signed by Yahoo! worldwide in the last 18 months to over 60.

Source :- Financial Express | DNA-Money