Yahoo Search User Statistics | Will Yahoo Survive?

Good morning this is part 2 of user statistics and demographics for the top 4 engines. Excluding AOL as it is powered with Google results. Day 1: MSN / Live; Day 2: Yahoo (You are here).

Welcome to part 2 Yahoo Search Demographics. Yesterday was MSN / Live, and its demo-graphical quirks. Yahoo is not the giant it used to be, and I would simply call it "failure to thrive". Yahoo rode that "authority" surge for a VERY long time. In my estimation, they should have committed more resources to development and search technology.

Having said that, I have a burning question for you....Will Yahoo survive? As many of you have probably noticed, I am am the type of person who looks to proven theories and logic for my answers. So, consider this, Terry Semel sold his stock; Susan Decker bought 47,000 shares; and you can see here they took a serious hit in the management shake up....But seem to be holding on. I think the questions at hand are, how smart is Decker, and what does she know that we do not?

Decker holds a bachelor of science degree from Tufts University, with a double major in computer science and economics, and a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School. She also received the designation of Chartered Financial Analyst in 1989 and served on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council (FASAC) for a four-year term, from January 2000 to January 2004. Decker served on the board of directors of Pixar Animation Studios from June 2004 to May 2006, until its sale to Disney and The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) from March 2005 to May 2007. Decker currently serves on the board of directors for Berkshire Hathaway, Intel Corporation and Costco Wholesale.

I strongly suspect the answer is, she is highly intelligent, educated, seasoned and she has big ideas for Yahoo. So, I will go on record right now and say Yahoo will survive and begin to recover. Having said that, what can Yahoo do for you?

In May Yahoo was at 21.5% of the market share of Internet searches, but fell a small bit to 20.2. I would call that negligible. The important number is year over year growth. In May they were up 18.6%, then 20.3% in June. They are not capturing as much of the market share as they should, but the continue to grow.

Yahoo tends to appeal pretty equally between the sexes, but women are statistically known to find paid ads to be more relevant on all engines. However, Yahoo strongly favors a younger crowd (<35).>

If you want to target a strong Yahoo audience then try the Yahoo Buzz Log. The Yahoo Buzz Log contains very well updated information on popular searches, and those declining. It has the ability to get popular searches specifically from Canada, and France. The platform also has several vertical options available: Actors, movies, music, sports, TV, and video games. Yahoo also has several search topic specific feeds to use. While this service is incredibly current its lack search ability.

The most tried and true Yahoo search information comes from Overture. There are many Overture tools available, but I favor the Bulk Overture Tool. You can submit several queries at a time, and it has the ability to deep analyze and retrieve 21 different country specific results. Overture information is not current, so to speak, usually running about 4 to 8 months behind. You might find this keyword Selector tool useful also. I caution you, Overture tools tend to be a bit slow and dodgy.

I think Yahoo is making some good moves with new development. Yahoo Local, arguably the best business directory, just got a nice overhaul. One thing I have noticed about Yahoo pages it that they are slow to load overall. The new Yahoo local loads in almost 30 seconds on a 28.8...That's within standard but not good. Their main game landing page is just awful, loading in 235.21 seconds at 28.8 which is still 53 seconds on a cable connection! Too much script, and stying in the page. I really think Yahoo should tackle this issue. When I first started seriously working on my SEO, upgrading to CSS styled pages and reducing images for quicker load times nearly doubled the traffic on most of my sites.

Yahoo does a very nice job handling all sorts of feeds. Submit your sitemap in a text form in addition to the sitemap protocol. I would say the page mechanics and validation requirements are VERY lax in Yahoo, but I would not expect that to continue. Slurp is a pretty active and efficient crawler so they have big indexing ability....Yahoo just tends to crawl the same sites over and over with not enough emphasis on new sites.

Have Yahoo search experiences or information? Feel free to comment, at the Cog posts get edited and the commenter gets credit!

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"


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Riding the MSN Live Wave | Demographics for Success

Good morning this is part 1 of user statistics and demographics for the top 4 engines. Excluding AOL as it is powered with Google results. Day 1: MSN / Live (You are here); Day 2: Yahoo.

MSN - Live has really been hammering away at the gap between themselves and Google's prowess. This is the best tool I have ever seen to find out where your site is hitting in user metrics on MSN / Live! Enter a keyword / phrase, or URL for your site and find out the gender split, and the age breakdown of your users on MSN. Why is this valuable?

Because MSN is a rapidly growing index, of tried and true users. Last year, Nov. 2006, MSN's market share reported by Netratings was only 8.8%. This year, June 2007, they came in with 13.3% of the market share. That's a growth rate of 77.4% over the previous year. I'm telling you right now, MSN is NOT dead. They are quietly building their index and plotting their future in a "controlled burn".

So, what type of readers does MSN / Live generally have?
MSN statistically has and user base of 49% males that are 73.4% between the ages of 25 - 54.

35.6% 18-34
73.4% are 25-54
13.8% are 55+

So how about the most important demographic value that MSN has over the other engines?
63.4% of MSN / Live searchers ear over 50,000 a year! Additionally, 39.7% earn over 75,000. Hmmmmmm.....how about that level of expendable income?

Online Shopping
93.3% have shopped online in the past 6 months
80.6% have purchased online in the past 6 months

Now the clincher.......MSN / Live searchers are 48% more likely to buy from you! Now we are getting somewhere.

I know i am going to hear about how MSN delivers low volumes of traffic to web sites. The thing to consider is this, not ALL web sites have low traffic from MSN. If you site falls in the demographic targets of MSN, you will do well. Additionally, even at low traffic they are more likely to buy...Quality not quantity!

Some Tips for MSN / Live Optimizing:

• Watch closely for broken links
• Make sure your code is proper and easy to crawl
• Use a 301 to the new URL is you move one
• Static link for every page you want them to index
• High relevance and page topic concentration
• Sitemap in your robots.txt
• No more than 3 clicks from the main page

I plan to continue this series with the other engines. So stay tuned!

Let me know what your experience with MSN / Live is...Comment below.

Peace SEO

Melanie Prough
"Baby"


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