The Yahoo! Search Engine, the “Yahoo! Slurp” has altered its algorithm formula. It now gives far less weight to backlinks and Page Ranking and far more weight to relevance and web design. All you have to do is read the Yahoo Help guidelines for yourself. Yahoo has made a dramatic shift away from backlinks and Page Ranking towards relevance and web design. Obviously they got sick of web sites using linking trickery to artificially inflate their search engine ranking.

Here it is straight from the horse's mouth: Watch how many times Yahoo uses the word “relevance”. Yahoo says, “Each search engine uses its own criteria, its own formula to determine the relevance of potential matches…Our search engine presents the results in a list, ranked by relevance. Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) display links to relevant web pages…Web sites that focus on delivering quality original content on a frequent basis will almost certainly outperform sites using…linking tricks, or other short term strategies to artificially boost relevance…Do not use link farms or other linking strategies that cause our search engine to penalize your site…Yahoo! wants pages designed primarily for humans, with search engine considerations secondary…Yahoo considers unwanted…pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking.”

So what are you supposed to do when the different search engines use different formulas to determine the visibility of your website? Yahoo says, “Determine which search engine supplies most of your traffic then optimize for that engine.” “Optimize” refers to Search Engine Optimization or SEO which means web design and web marketing, website promotion.

Here is how to rank high on Yahoo. Yahoo says, “The number of pages (on the website) containing the words you enter,…will determine where your site appears in the search results.” This is the key to relevance which I shall now explain more precisely.

The first thing you need is an honest and talented Web Design Company, or search engine optimization company, SEO company to design for you a relevant website. Here is how you make your website relevant to the search queries, the words typed into the search engine box by the millions of people every day.

Lets say that your business is SEO. Lets talk about your home page. You want the word SEO and Search Engine Optimization to appear in your Title, Description, naturally several times in the text on your home page and in your URL. The most often overlooked place is in your URL, your web address. In the Title, the closer to the first word in the Title the better. Be careful not to spam these words, they must occur naturally, otherwise Yahoo will penalize your website. On Yahoo a website following these simple rules which has 200 backlinks could outperform a competitor website with 5,000 backlinks which does not follow these simple relevance rules. With Yahoo! it's all about relevance. Having said all of that relevant quality backlinks are still important to Yahoo!