Yahoo Back To Basics For SEO Or Have They Never Left

[davidmg]

I have several Yahoo ECOM sites that are all a few years old. A friend of mine just opened a Yahoo store (Basic) and asked me to help build it. I was astonished to see that Yahoo has made some changes in the back end that are not on my sites. They are creating meta tags for SEO. Two new fields have been added.

PAGE-TITLE
Text entered in the page-title field will be used in the title tag for the page. By default, the page-title will use the Name you supplied for the product when added through the Add Product wizard. If you created the product in the Store Editor, then you will need to specify the page-title or else the text in the Name field will be used (or the title global variable if no name is present).

The title tag is important for a few reasons:

The title tag is important in terms of informing search engines of the content of each page and is used in determining the relevancy of a page for search queries.
The title tag appears at the top of the web browser.
The title tag text is the default text when a visitor bookmarks a page.
The title tag may be used by search engines as the link to the page in search results pages.
Tips for title tags:
Keep titles short—between 60-85 characters.
Start with your most important keywords/keyphrases
Always use keywords that appear within the body content of the page—do not stuff keywords.
Place your business name only at the end unless you are trying to rank for your company name.

The second one

Description

Text entered in the description field will be used in the meta description tag of the page. By default, the description you enter in the Add Product Wizard will be added to the description field. This tag has some implications for search engines and at times is used as the description for the page in search engine results.

Keep in mind the following tips when creating descriptions for pages:

Enter 25 to 30 words or less with no more than 160 to 180 characters total.
Make sure your description is relevant to your page content. Use the same keywords/keyphrases from your product or category description. This may help boost the relevancy of your page with search engines.
Web directories such as Yahoo! and DMOZ (open directory project) may use the description as the summary of your page (note: the description may be modified by editors so it may appear different).

I have noticed several posts asking about SEO for Google, Yahoo and MSN and how to optimize for each one. And also posts questioning the relavance to meta tags.

It appears that Yahoo is back to pushing meta tags for SEO. They still offer the field for "head tags" but have added more.

Does this answer the question that "Yes Meta Tags" are still important? Will the other search engines pick up on the meta tags?

[incrediblehelp]

They are probably just doing it because people have been asking for it. The fact of the matter is the only meta tag that is useful is the description tag and the title attribute still being highly important to the rankings of the website.

What Yahoo seems to be saying more recently is your anchor text seems to be VERY important.

Yahoo Displays SERP Title Based On Anchor Text

crappy as that may be.

[hhheng]

Wow, hope yahoo will pay more attention to meta tags, they never show my description tag in the SERPs, instead shows the menu bar texts which are useless.

[DianaRSWD]

In some of the older stores, you could not even make changes to your description tag on a page by page basis without the help of an RTML'er... the new v3 stores are much more SEO-friendly and now allow basic users to change the title, keyword and description for each and every page. (Certainly consider upgrading!)

I do not believe that Yahoo is putting more emphasis on meta tags in their search engine - instead I'm fairly certain that it's simply a result of Yahoo listening to their customers and store developers as I was in on some of the calls where they asked the developers what new features they would like to see in the new version. Meta tags seemed to rank high in the list of improvements developers would like to see.

In comparison to the old store versions... the new v3 stores have a lot of SEO advantages. They brought in the use of CSS and have cleaned up their code considerably. I am very happy with the new changes they have made thus far and hope to continue to see improvements.