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.

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Ki Gray - Austin Realtor - Working in Austin his site covers the Austin Real Estate market. If you are considering investing in Austin be sure to check out his Austin Real Estate Blog or look through some of the Austin Homes currently for sale.

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!

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Infinity Commercial Group - Commercial Lending Services

Infinity Website

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

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.

Jason,

How far should one go with this format?

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As Jason said, it should be done for every page on your site and it should be consistant.

I take a slightly different approach than Jason and tie it into my design architecture by using the tags in a hierarchal structure. I use the h1 tag, with my main key word phase, at the top, either above the header or as text over the header image. I want the h1 text the first thing that the SE encounters in the html body. This is also why I seldom use flash in the header. Some developers go further to suggest, that in addition to the h1 tag, to put the text in an anchor to the main page. With CSS you can design the tags so the text will fit the style of your site. The h1 tag doesn't need to be followed by a paragraph but it could if it makes sense. I use h2 headings to broaden the focus. For example if my main key word is "my city Investment," I might have two h2 sub-themes "Invest in my city Luxury Homes" and "Invest in my city Preconstruction Condos." I sometimes follow the h2 heading with more descriptive content but more often I use h3 headings for paragraph text that further broadens the focus. Think inverted funnel.

Why go through so much bother and trouble? To lead the search engines to the semantic meaning of your site so it will be indexed and rated in the best possible light.

I agree with frobn, once again i didn't go into enough detail. although on our clients sites we do use flash, all of our sites use css and div layers to accomplish this.

P.S. I wouldn't worry too much about PR. I would pay more attention to how well the site does in the serp's. I have had high PR sites that have not done well in the serps and vice versa.

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.

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

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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.