Current trends for ranking on my big 3

[Steven1976a]

I want to get peoples feed back on current trends and what they feel are the basics for good ranking on my big three. Msn, yahoo, Google. I will start and hopefully get some input to get ideas to explore and experiment

Google
Sandbox - I am a beliver that it exists due to the fact after florida update we disappeared completely and after about 18 months our pages started ranking again

Links - Obviously. Link text placed on other sites to your own site important. Previously I never linked with the word "wholesale" which is why i think our site does not perform with word wholesale.

Key words within the url - example I believe that if you want a 3 keyword search you shouldnt have all 3, but have two and then optimise the page to include the additional third word

Titles

Keywords in title

Pages within the site that link direct from the home page which are key word rich

MSN
Ive been reading about peoples comments over the past few days with bugs and links changing rapidly cant comment at the moment.

I think very fresh pages.

Very rich in key words in page text and titles.

Yahoo
Im not sure at the moment about Yahoo. We use to do very well on Yahoo and not google and now vice versa. A couple of points i would like to suggest are as follows

Yahoo like "older settled pages" within the sie (not home page)

Lots of links from the home page to a specific search term.

Lots of on page text

Keyword rich titles.

I would appreciate it if everyone rips apart my comments and gives me their input without just saying lots of links. Lets get stuck into some of the smaller points.
steve

[Andilinks]

The other day I ran into this amazing document, please forgive if you've already seen it but I found it most helpful.

http://www.seomoz.org/articles/search-ranking-factors.php?comments=1

Andi

[incrediblehelp]

Yahoo
Im not sure at the moment about Yahoo. We use to do very well on Yahoo and not google and now vice versa. A couple of points i would like to suggest are as follows

Yahoo like "older settled pages" within the sie (not home page)

Lots of links from the home page to a specific search term.

Lots of on page text

Keyword rich titles.

I think more and more Yahoo is trying to decipher between real and what is not real. MSN and Google have not done this very well, but Yahoo seems to have whether it is done by hand or automated they find minisites and SEO driven interlinking very well. Have you looked at this fro your family of websites?

[ppayne]

I've always noticed that Yahoo likes "spot on" matches for titles, e.g. if you search for Yulia Nova, and a page has exactly Yulia Nova as the title (with nothing else), you'll be in line to get the top spot.

[kgun]

I think more and more Yahoo is trying to decipher between real and what is not real. MSN and Google have not done this very well, but Yahoo seems to have whether it is done by hand or automated they find minisites and SEO driven interlinking very well. Have you looked at this fro your family of websites?


http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

1. Click on the green dmoz button.
2. Click on the Yahoo button.
3. Click on the msn button.

I have seen sites wit tools that list the PR of different directories. Only one have pagerank 9 and none 8, but that is misleading according to this
http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php list.

I do not know so much about msn, but have posted some comments on this http://www.talkadsense.com/ forum.

As far as I know the KW tag is more important for Yahoo than for Google, but that may only be rumours read on other forums.

There is so much speculation on this and other forums and generalization from n=1 to n=k that it is sometimes boring reading. In my view there is four possibilities:
1. Thorough scientific analysis where different theories are tested by statistical methods. That may take time.
2. Reading, reading, reading. There must be some truth in the consensus.
3. Finding a good specialist, e.g. http://oreilly.com/ or http://www.useit.com/ The article Andilinks points you to seems good, and it has some good links to other resources.
4. More or less qualified guessing.

You ask for simple answers. I only gave you a simple answer about the KW meta tag. I can not give you a simple answer, since I am not in the inner circle at Google, MSN or Yahoo. Somebody else may have taken the lift together with Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Larry Page etc.