Yahoo search engine optimization can be easy when you set up your site on Yahoo Site Explorer, a webmaster tool for Yahoo SEO, which is equivalent to Google’s Webmaster Tools and Bing’s Webmaster Tools.
You can either use your existing Yahoo ID or create a new Yahoo ID to sign-in to Yahoo Site Explorer account.
Website Ownership Authentication
Before using Yahoo Site Explorer, you have to go through the authentication step. Verify the ownership of your web site either by:
- Uploading a verification file to your site’s hosting space, or
- Adding code to your site’s META tag
Sitemap Submission
To notify Yahoo’s index (Slurp) about your site’s pages, submit your website’s sitemap file once to Yahoo Site Explorer.
Site Statistics
Your website’s statistics are available for review on Yahoo Site Explorer:
- Crawled Pages
- All Known Pages
- Known Hosts on This Site
- Hosts linking to Site
- Domains linking to Site
- Hosts Outlinked from Site
- Domains Outlinked from Site
Web Site’s Crawl Errors
Yahoo Site Explorer shows you the crawl errors to your site, including 404 errors. You can determine the web pages that need to have 301 redirects set up, according the crawl error information.
Top Search Queries and URLs
Yahoo Site Explorer shows:
- The top search queries that users searched on Yahoo before arriving at your site
- The top URLs that Yahoo’s users visited
Dynamic URLs
When your site have dynamic URLs with parameters and session IDs, it always causes issues for Yahoo’s search algorithm. You can specify up to 10 dynamic parameters in Yahoo Site Explorer so that Yahoo’s search algorithm can figure it out. Yahoo Site Explorer will treat each dynamic parameter with one of the methods:
- Remove parameters from your site’s URLs
- Set default values for parameters
Show Inbound Links
Through Yahoo Site Explorer, You can review the inbound links (aka inlinks or backlinks) from other websites pointing to your site. With this backlink data, you can export up to 1000 lines of data in spreadsheet format.
You can even include a Yahoo Search Badge on your site in which a “counter” of the number of backlinks to your site will be shown.
Delicious and SearchMonkey
Yahoo Site Explorers shows your site’s brief statistics regarding Delicious bookmarks and top Delicious tags. You are also shown your SearchMonkey objects’ statistics.