To have a successful business online, getting a good ranking on the search engine is really important and this is only possible with certain methods. Search engine optimization which is basically a way of improving the quality of web traffic through the search engines and eradicating the unnecessary ones by using certain keywords or key phrases that can benefit the company or its website. It is a way of marketing a website through the search engine. The way major search engines like Google and Yahoo rank your site may be different, however, as a website owner, what matters is how well your site is ranked in most of these search engines. After all, it will determine the traffic driven to your website!
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN are few names which come to your mind when talking about these engines. From a search-engine company’s perspective, it is a complex task to give a ranking to any website – based on the ‘look’ of the site, quality of content, relevance of information that needs to be shared, and much more. So these search engines use different methods or ‘algorithms’ the tech geeks call, to rank a website. SEO, from a website owner’s perspective, is a tool to implement a standardized approach to improve the site ranking of the website – the better the site ranking is, the better the overall traffic to website becomes.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo use different guidelines and methods for the implementation of SEO. Whereas the only similarity between both these search engines is that they spider web pages and store it in their database and provide desired results. Understanding the basic differences between these two search engines can help a lot in deciding after all the main purpose is to get a better visibility.
Differences:
• One of the major differences between Yahoo and Google is the concentration of the keyword volume. Too much use of keywords gives a higher ranking in Yahoo but in Google, a website can be banned due to the same reason. Google can easily find out when it is tried to increase the keyword density of a website. Such websites become penalized. Yahoo has more patience with the high keyword density but websites that have an abnormally high keyword density will be banned by Yahoo permanently.
• Few years back Yahoo was only a human edited directory and used Google’s search engine to fish out results! The whole scenario has now changed and Yahoo also features its own distinct search engine with different SEO algorithms.
• Yahoo tends to categorize the site as per the content relevance and many more factors, whereas, google matches a keyword punched in, partially or fully to give back exact results.

Similarities: Whatever the differences are, the way these two major search-engine companies work, the bone of contention is only one thing – what do you want to achieve from your website! It’s not just a business drive to incorporate few SEO guidelines and get a good ranking in any one of these, or for that matter, both of these search engines. Rankings change, so do the ways these companies rank you! So it’s important to implement a healthy mix of SEO guidelines that would get your website ranking to a decent level, in Google as well as Yahoo.
The most important aspect of any website is quality – the quality of content that your site provides, the authenticity of back-links, and ultimately what you really want to gain from your website. A right mix of keywords, Meta tags, and of course, high quality unique content and focusing on getting a few exceptionally high quality links can help a site rank go up quickly.