Hi Jill,

I stumbled across your highrankings.com web site through a number of doors (links). I was very much interested in your site and your articles, and see some good credibility (your references, i.e., Business 2.0 which I also read frequently).

Anyway, I have been trying to market our site to get a decent ranking in all of the major search engines, particularly Google.

I would like to ask your expert advice on a couple of things:

- Would buying a $300 listing (the cost to be entered into Yahoo! search) with Yahoo! affect our ranking in Google? Would it recognize Yahoo! as a weighted link?

- Do many people still use Yahoo!?

- If we register with Trust-E (they seem to be credible/large), will this weighting also help with Google?

I think on Google, we are currently coming up around 640th for [our main keyword]! If a search is performed on [our company name] we come up number 1, however we want to come up when someone performs a search on our keyword.

I have been banging my head against a wall trying to figure this stuff out (working 18 hours a day), and wow, they sure don't make it very easy!

Anyway, any input would be GREATLY appreciated.

Best regards,

Michael Iwasaki

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Michael,

Glad you found me! Thanks for your questions. They are similar to ones I receive a lot, and I think many others will benefit from the answers.

First of all, optimizing your site to rank highly in Google is really no different from optimizing it for any other search engine. They all want to see the same thing -- great sites that are full of worthwhile information. It's true that Google and the other spidering search engines place some emphasis on the links pointing to your site to help determine its ranking. After all, sites that *suck* generally don't get linked to by other sites.

Theoretically, Yahoo! doesn't list poor-quality sites in their directory, and therefore engines such as Google assume that a link from them means something. (Whether this is true is a debate for another time!) So in answer to your first question, yes, a listing in Yahoo! may very well have some positive effect on your Google ranking.

A listing at Yahoo! can very often bring a ton of traffic in its own right. Yes, there are still many people who use Yahoo! for all their searching needs. They've got a decent directory and for backup they have Google results. Yahoo! always rates very highly in every published survey I've seen regarding top search properties. A good listing in Yahoo!, i.e., one where you rank highly for your important keyword phrases, can bring a ton of traffic to your site. On the other hand, a poor listing brings hardly any Yahoo! traffic. Unfortunately, there's no tried-and-true method of ensuring that you get a good listing.

A new phenomenon I've noticed is that newly added sites seem to get placed at the end of the results, even though the important keyword phrases are being used in the site description. (If others have noticed this same thing, please let me know, as I've been trying to figure this one out.) I recently had a site listed in Yahoo! that's showing up after tons of other sites that don't even have the exact keyword combination anywhere in their title or description! Totally irrelevant sites are coming before the relevant sites. It's almost as if Yahoo! is using the search parameter "or" when two or more words are being searched for, as opposed to "and," which should be the default. I hope this is just a temporary glitch, because it doesn't give new sites a chance to fairly compete with the old sites.

But back to the questions at hand!

Regarding TrustE and whether you should register with them: if you feel it's a worthwhile organization to register with, you should do it. It may give some site visitors a feeling of trust in your site, and that should be your motivating factor. As far as I know, the search engines don't give any extra boost to sites that are registered with such organizations, however. It's important to do things for your site that make sense for your overall site quality. If you do something *only* because you believe it will increase your search engine rankings, then you've got to change your mindset. If you do something that enhances your visitors' overall site experience, it will produce great dividends. Remember I said that people don't link to sites that *suck*? Well, they do link to great sites! The best way to increase your overall link popularity is by making a great site. If this also helps your search engine rankings, then more power to you. If it doesn't...well, at least you have a great site!

I wanted to comment on one other thing from the original question. I took out the keyword for publication, but it was a one-word keyword, and a highly competitive one at that. I can tell you for sure that trying to rank highly for that one-word keyword is what is causing all your ranking nightmares. There are hundreds of related two- and three-word phrases you could and should be targeting instead. Many of them would use the single keyword within them, thus indirectly targeting your main phrase. Get that one-word keyword out of your mind ASAP! First, work on creating great copy based on two- and three-word phrases. You should have a lot of success this way, and also a lot of traffic if you optimize the pages accordingly. Plus, you'll be able to stop banging your head against the wall!

Jill