why does yahoo hate me

[escapeso]

So I am trying to figure out why yahoo hates my site. For a term such as
central texas realtor

My rankings for the top 3 search engines

MSN -- 1
Google -- 35
Yahoo -- 323

Can anyone give me an ideas of what I am doing wrong. My site is www.escapesomewhere.com. When one gets banned do they fall out of the search completely or just fall to the bottom. I have been pretty diligent about trying to keep my site clean and avoiding any blackhat techniques.

Whats wierd is I show quite a few backlinks in yahoo 251 at last count. It seems from reading online that yahoo and msn have a similar algorithm. Or at the least that yahoo falls between msn and google. So its wierd that I do okay on msn and google but yahoo detests my site. Does anyone have any ideas on what I might be doing wrong.

[Infinity Commercial Group]

I'm just going to take a shot in the dark here. I only looked at your home page and notice that you only mention the text words realtor, Texas once on the page and those are buttons. No where do I see the word central. Also your Meta Tags in my opinion are way over baked. (some may agree/some may not) I have always had more success by keeping it generally speaking more simple. You have an overload of words in your tags that I see no where on the page, also you don't have to do every variation of phrasing like you have now. You also need to keep in consideration that the search term that you are seeking is very vague. I am sure there has got to be thousands of Central Texas Realtors trying for the same position. If I was you I would try to add a city name into the search term. Get that in the search engines then try dropping the city name. I think you will find that easier. You seem to have good Google rankings. Yahoo is one of the easier search engines to submit to. You did a good job with Google so Yahoo should be a cake walk.
Good Luck!

[SEO Jason]

Does yahoo hate you? In a way the answer is Yes. It's not that yahoo hates you or your site, it's just that it uses different criteria than Google. Yahoo puts a lot more emphasis on headers and content than Google. I would suggest creating an h1 tag with central texas realtor and than right below that put a bunch of content about being a central texas realtor. If your looking for a formula to rank well in Google, try this...

H1
Paragraph
h2
paragraph
h2
paragraph
h3
paragraph

Of course each element contains your main kw phrase, then hit up the title, desc and meta kw tag in the same fashion

Use your kws in the filenames as well as the anchors to other internal pages
try an onpage anchor or 2, and toss in a couple of alts

Cheers
Jason

[frobn]

If your looking for a formula to rank well in Google, try this...

H1
Paragraph
h2
paragraph
h2
paragraph
h3
paragraph

Of course each element contains your main kw phrase, then hit up the title, desc and meta kw tag in the same fashion

Use your kws in the filenames as well as the anchors to other internal pages
try an onpage anchor or 2, and toss in a couple of alt

The advice is excellent but the correct use of heading tags may be a bit more involved than you describe. The way the heading tags are displayed would indicate that there is no differentiation between them. Generally, heading tags, aside from aiding the reader, provide semantic meaning for search engines. The <h1> should be a broad general statement about the web page similar to the title meta tag. The <h2> tag would usually denote a sub-theme and the <h3> tag would be the detail (content) to support the theme and/or the sub-theme. The integrity of the page/site is proportional to the degree which heading tags, meta tags and content are congruent, i.e. support each other and is what search engines and visitors are looking for.

[postair15]

I think it's virtually impossible to optimize one site for all three major SEs, unless you are a big name like Amazon and have millions of links.

[kensmith]

I think it's virtually impossible to optimize one site for all three major SEs, unless you are a big name like Amazon and have millions of links.

Not true. There are many agents sites that are top 10 for all 3 for their main keywords.

[SEO Jason]

exactly Ken, and thanks for pointing that out frobn, sometimes i simplify too much.

many realtors will actually rank high in all three search engines for competitive keywords that they target on internal pages as well. Links and content is what you need. On-page optimization for yahoo, which msn seems to be duplicating and than backlinks for Google. Google likes similar on-page optimization as Yahoo, but also requires more backlinks.

[Bob Crain]

Does yahoo hate you? In a way the answer is Yes. It's not that yahoo hates you or your site, it's just that it uses different criteria than Google. Yahoo puts a lot more emphasis on headers and content than Google. I would suggest creating an h1 tag with central texas realtor and than right below that put a bunch of content about being a central texas realtor. If your looking for a formula to rank well in Google, try this...

H1
Paragraph
h2
paragraph
h2
paragraph
h3
paragraph

Of course each element contains your main kw phrase, then hit up the title, desc and meta kw tag in the same fashion

Use your kws in the filenames as well as the anchors to other internal pages
try an onpage anchor or 2, and toss in a couple of alts

Cheers
Jason

Jason,

How far should one go with this format?

[SEO Jason]

every page as far as i'm concerned and you don't have to sacrifice the look of your site either. For example...

http://www.jakemarsh.com

Look in the main body and see how it's structured. Then look at all the pages under featured areas. They are almost set up this way. They could have been done better. a couple more paragraphs and a couple more headers. But when doing it myself I would use one h1, two h2's and then from there if i had more to go on the page then i would make h3's. If you click on Arvada Real Estate under the featured areas navigation you will see that he has one h1 and one h2. I would have laid it out more like this...

<h1>Arvada Real Estate</h1>
Paragraph on arvada real estate
<h2>Arvada Homes</h2>
Paragraph on arvada homes
<h2>Arvada Informations</h2>
paragraph on arvada information.

kinda like that. i'd do probably one main keyword, two secondary keywords and then one to three triatary keywords. It all depends upon how much content you have, and how many keywords you'd like to target about Arvada. Remember when making them though, always provide new information and don't repeat yourself too much. People are going to read your site and you want it to be useful and informative to them.

[Bob Crain]

Thanks! Great looking website as an example!

I have some work to do to get my site back up to pr5!