Yahoo is the number two search engine. While Google continues to dominate and drives most of the traffic on the Internet, Yahoo is preferred by many users. The following links provide tips, marketing tools and useful information that can help a site owner utilize Yahoo’s search services more effectively.
(more…)

The robots.txt file, also known as the robots exclusion file, is probably the best way to protect specific files and directories from being indexed by search engines. Why would you want to do this? To prevent certain Web pages, images or other Web objects from being added to a search engine’s database.
(more…)

The World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the W3C, is the organization tasked with setting and maintaining the international standards for common Web scripting languages, such as HTML, XHTML and cascading style sheets (CSS). Their web site offers several valuable tools that assure that a Web site is compliant with international coding standards. First and foremost is the W3C HTML and XHTML code validator.
(more…)

Search engine optimization is not rocket science, but it does take a degree of dedication to stay on top of the continually changing environment. Every Web site owner desires improved search engine rankings, but very few actually dedicate the time and expense necessary to structure their Web sites, pages, content and other elements for improved
search engine rankings. That’s actually good news for those who do make an effort, because it keeps the level of competition down.
(more…)

A search engine spider called BecomeBot recently appeared and is causing problems with some e-commerce sites. The spider is identified by the BecomeBot User Agent. This can be easily identified by checking the User Agent section of Webalizer, AwStats or whichever log file analysis software you use. If the BecomeBot spider is hitting your site, you will see it near the top of the list. Here is how to deal with it.
(more…)