grandpa - 10:42 am on May 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

>> I don't understand you guys why bother with Yahoo..
That's a no brainer really. Yahoo provides traffic and sales. Thru Overture, a directory and shopping.

>> What are the most important factors in Yahoo?
I can't answer that, but I can answer to what I do and that could be relevant since I have a bunch of pages ranking well in Y.

I use meta tags. Description, page title and keywords are all accurate for any given page. I try to validate every page. I use CSS to keep most of my style codes off the page. I build my pages for human visitors, not for bots. That means I quit worrying about some on page factors, like keyword ratio.

Building pages for visitors means a better experience for the visitor, and results in more page views. I can only surmise that Y knows how many times I've been visited for a given search, and they may factor that into their algo.

The site is established with several years of history. That could be a factor.

I keep my pages fresh. Nearly every day at least one page gets 'the treatment'. I fine tune the meta-data. I validate the page. I verify everything is working on the page; links, forms, images.. everything. It seems like several of Y's bots are living on my server - pages updates (and new pages) get crawled within hours, if not minutes.