Yahoo Discusses Their SEO Strategy

Yahoo has shifted from the world’s largest search engine (of ages past) to a major content hub. In recent months, Yahoo has worked hard to improve their SEO strategy and the results have been brilliant. Here’s what you can learn through their efforts.

Yahoo’s Priorities

Since Yahoo shuffled off its search back-end to Bing, the company has become more focused on content production and optimization. As stated by Carol Bartz during the annual shareholder meeting last month, Yahoo is still thriving when it comes to news, entertainment, and other media content. For that reason, Yahoo prioritized “news, sports, and finance, globally.”

Many of these outlets have seen new iterations in recent months, and Yahoo boasts “triple-digit percentage increases in SEO traffic in some regions.” That’s thanks to some specific SEO tactics and a methodology that works those tactics into the framework of each product.

Yahoo’s Approach to SEO

Yahoo had some dilemmas when it came to SEO, largely thanks to the veteran services that still ran on grandfathered systems. In reconstructing those systems, Yahoo made a firm decision to prioritize modern SEO. Many of the changes were most visible through Yahoo News, where article URLs were painfully bad (or “long and non-intuitive,” as David Roth puts it) and the pages were riddled with duplicate content.

Both of these items were resolved in the restructuring of Yahoo News, but to make that happen, Yahoo employed a broader strategy:

• Executive support was enlisted, and many upper-tier representatives were enthusiastic about SEO.
• SEO was built into the development process in a variety of phases, rather than just tagged on at the end.
• Yahoo committed to fixing the specific problems that have long been visible but unresolved.

With the positive results, it’s clear that Yahoo’s example is a good one to follow.

[Sources include: the Yahoo Blog & Search Engine Land]