A Tale of 2 WAHMs

Well, after my first few posts on this topic I really haven’t done a whole lot with it since. Just as I suspected, there really is no “magic formula” or special trick that’s going to boost you right up to the top of results in Yahoo. Just like Google, it takes time and hard work. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to improve on the site as a whole, and not really just for Yahoo.
What I did notice on Yahoo was they seem to like big established sites as well as micro-niches.  The more incoming links to a give page (including internal links) the better. I’m sure they pay attention to relevancy just as Google does, but it seems to me it’s just not as much (with incoming links).

I’ve also noticed (and read this in other places) that Yahoo puts a lot of emphasis on relevancy of the page itself compared to the rest of the site. It looks closely at the navigation to see if in fact this page is similar topics to the rest of the pages on the site. Unfortunately while Idea Queen is directed to a specific type of person (moms in general) , the pages don’t “match” so well. Not to Yahoo anyway. They don’t see recipes and kids bedroom ideas as two things that go together (of course us moms do, but not Yahoo). Thus my rankings suffer a bit.

I also happen to read how closely Yahoo pays attention to CSS and other code. I mentioned this in a previous post and how I planned to overhaul the site, cleaning up the code. I *thought* I was doing a great job of that until I started in Cricket’s advanced SEO class (yes I paid the fee to be in it - I trust Cricket 100% with SEO because she REALLY knows what she is talking about, and I am not above taking in new advice on SEO regardless of the fact I’ve been doing it for several years).

In the first lesson she gave us an add on for FireFox that has all kinds of useful tools for SEO web designers. It has tools to validate HTML, CSS, links, and a hoard of other things. She also gave some other links to tools I’m still playing around with. Just at a first glance I see how my site is NOT even close to being “cleaned up” like I thought I was doing. No, there is a LOT of work I see that needs to be done. Which again excites me, because “needs work” translates to “possibility for increased success”.  I absolutely LOVE to know work needs to be done. I know once I do the work I see in front of me, I’ll be farther ahead than I was before.  :wink:

Now back to Yahoo SEO for a minute and the point I made about “large sites”. Since I do not have a “niche site”, I need to have a large one. Which of course means I need LOTS more pages. The best way to do this? Blogging. Yup, I’m still blogging at Idea Queen on a daily basis. At the very least I get one post up a day, but most day I try  my hardest for two. The more pages that are relevant to my current content on the site, the better. Also the more incoming (internal) links I’ll have on the site as well. That can NEVER hurt.

I’ll stop there because I feel like I’m repeating myself a bit, and saying exactly the same thing I’ve said in other posts. Trying to rank in Yahoo is going to be a challenge that won’t be over any time soon, so there is no sense in me blogging about it every day. I will, however, give you an update if I start to see my rankings rise.

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