Does Yahoo follow success with other SE's?

[webhits2000]

After following the advice from this forum (it's great
> > to be able to draw upon the expertise of so many
> > knowledgable and helpful folks) and others, my web
> > site
> > has finally been listed by
> > Yahoo (Number 1 in fact for the keyword phrase
> > "successful tanning salon). My experience has been
> > that it was my gradual success with the other less
> > difficult search engines, that finally led to my
> > success with Yahoo. I followed the steps set out in
> > the free tutorial on my site at (no ads please) and
> > consequently (edited) was first successful
> > with Lycos, Dogpile, Northern Light (all #1) Google
> > (#2) and Alta Vista (#6). This whole process took
> > about 3 months (I thought I was never going to see any
> > results using the Web Position software), but Google
> > came through first and then the others(including
> > Yahoo) seemed to follow. I did not pay for the express
> > service. Is it possible that the search engines give
> > you higher listings because of a good listing with
> > other search engines? I am a novice web site designer,
> > and have so far published about 15 sites - all linking
> > to each other with transparent links, and I believe
> > this is the main reason for my search engine success
> > with this particular site. Happy Thanksgiving everyone
> > - Pete


Edited by simon c on 11-23-2000 at 05:52 PM

[simon c]

Hi Webhits, congratulations on your success. To some extent you're right. Search engines are increasingly looking at off page criteria to judge which sites are more relevant. The reasoning being that if a site has lots of links pointing to it then it must be of some value.

The trick here is to encourage other similar sites to link to you. Getting listed in Yahoo, Looksmart and ODP gives a great start to a site and contributes some very significant link relevancy to your site.

Also aim to have links to your site which contain your best keywords in the link text. I use a 'Link To Us' page where people can cut and paste the code, formatted how I want it, to include in their page.

Googles algorithm for instance, uses their 'Page Rank' system to determine what sites are about by the importance of those other sites for the users query. Find out more about it at http://www-db.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[Polymath]

Hi all,
Webhits2000, don't take this the wrong way, that's all well and good, but I wonder how many people search for the phrase 'succesful tanning salon'?
I would consider trying to rank well for a location, like e.g. "London tanning salon". A difficult part of the work is trying to find the words that people search for. Sorry, I'm not trying to denigrate your efforts, but I can't imagine people searching for your keyphrase.

[Postman1]

I must agree with you Polymath. According to goto's search suggestion tool, there were "0" times "succesful tanning salon" was search. There is a likelyhood that it may have been search in other search engines, but I really doubt that search phrase has contributed to any increase in traffic.