Enhancing traffic to your website through Linkbaiting

Linkbating is a new concept, but is becoming an effective way to drive more traffic to your website.
Linkbait is basically content created particularly to generate enough interest (like freebies, sensational stories, games etc.) for others to willingly create links back to your website. In simple words linkbaiting is nothing but encouraging others to link back to you.

Google also gives importance to the links in order to determine the page rank of a website. So your internet business is directly proportional to the quality backlinks of your website
The goal of Linkbaiting is to offer something so unique and mentionable that other sites will link to your site for free.
Several LinkBaiting ideas are:
1. Introduce a simple free tool or free template for people in your subject area to use, and spread it around, for instance a script that checks a site's rankings in Google, Yahoo and MSN.
2. Keep an eye on blogs, give reviews. If your review is well-written and constructive, you will get noticed and surely it will pay you in long run..
3. Write persuasive content : Nothing can bring you more incoming links than compelling content. Write content that people would like to read and recommend to their own visitors. This can be done by writing original research, unique posts, making people think, writing posts that teach new things, writing relevant postings, publish quality links.
4. Humor: Nothing is like writing something which will enlighten someone’s day, so if you have some funny pictures , humorous stories, or anything else that will generate laughter it could be posted on your site or blog. Doesn’t matter whether it relates to your company's business or not. Once people have clicked to your humor page, they will probably stay and look around a bit.
5. Contests and Games: organize some contests or games, this will surely drive traffic to your website.
6. Controversial opinions: A blog entry which has contradictory opinions will really lead to intense debates. It can certainly stir things up as readers alert others to what you have to say and then additionally will visit your website.
7. Sensational stories: If a client was saved because she was using your security system in his house, write an article about it. If your client’s business is increased dramatically after taking your SEO services then publish it.
Of course, there could be a lot more possibilities .The goal is simply to maximize the number of links to your site. Offering a free tool or a free service such as indicated above are a few ways of achieving that goal.
Best of luck in your Linkbaiting!

Growing to the peak - Internet marketing Strategies

The primary goal of any marketing strategy is to increase the company’s public existence so that the company’s business is promoted. Internet marketing is no less but its approach is little different and it target customers across the globe.
Many a times people think that by just buying a domain name and constructing a nice website will drive internet traffic, but that is not true. There are many other factors which are necessary to make yourself prove in this competitive world. Especially now it’s the time of recession and everyone is thinking ten times before purchasing a new product or services, but at this time if we will think that we can hire a low cost SEO company to optimize our website then that will be the silliest mistake which we will do, since internet marketing is the cheapest way of all the other marketing strategies and only by choosing the right internet marketing firm you can increase your website traffic and in turn your business.
In order to successfully market any business or product the marketer should have a firm idea of what they are doing and why they are doing it in order to estimate the response received and make adjustments as necessary. What is the unique product / service they provide which makes them special or what is their main motive behind doing that particular business. So the selection of keywords plays a very crucial role to optimize your website, which can only be done with the help of a good internet marketing company which uses ethical search optimization techniques.
There are several other ways to increase website traffic on your website. Some of them are listed below:
• email marketing
• social networking
• branding your website
• WOMM( Word Of Mouth Marketing)
• SEO
• PPC
• Backlinking
• Newsletters/ ezines
• Micro blogging
• Macro blogging
• User generated content
• Directory listing
• Listing in DMOZ

Email marketing:

It can be very effective tool if used properly. An extensive study should be performed before preparing a mailing list, so that only appropriate clients are picked. The email should be personalized so that the receiver should have a nice feeling. The list for which we are targeting email marketing should be prepared in such a way that we are not spammed. Remember having a bad name for once is remembered more than having good name, so we should be very cautious. In brief internet marketing can be proved a very economical way to market any business only when used appropriately.



Social Networking:

The introduction of the Internet, and especially the World Wide Web, has allowed people to meet new friends and acquaintances across the globe. By the advent of Social networking reaching to the masses has become very simple. The social marketing phenomenon has reached more people than any other marketing strategy in an amazing way, just you need to join the social network, put up the start up pages that correspond to the business and don’t forget to include the link of your company’s website. There are many social networking websites like linkedin, facebook, Myspace etc…

Branding of the website:
Your business's website will be many people's first impression of your company, products and services. As a result, your site represents a critical component of your branding strategy: It communicates who you are, what you offer and what you promise (your brand) through its content, organization and appearance (the look and feel).
WOMM( Word Of Mouth Marketing):
WOMM’ has got nothing to do with propaganda, advocacy or advertisement. In the marketing world conversation plays an integral part. And these new media sites focus on conversation as their integral part. For better or for worse people talk about products, events etc no one can stop that.
In this day and age, if you don’t have your own website for your business, it’s almost as if you do not exist. Recent studies have found that people are more likely to look up a business online than in the Yellow Pages or other traditional “old-school” ways.
Link building is the process of getting other web sites to place a link to your web site on their own web site.
SEO
Search engine optimization is the process of analyzing a web site and modifying it to enable search engines to read, understand, and index it correctly.
The objective of search engine optimization is to increase web visitor counts by ranking very high in the results of searches using the most appropriate keywords describing the content of your site.

PPC
Pay-per-Click (PPC) Advertising is a feature that is now being offered by the major search engines. Through a competitive bidding process, you can buy a favorable position on the search engine results for specific keyword search phrases that you choose. You pay for results only on a “per click” basis, hence the name Pay per Click Advertising. The twin advantages of PPC advertising are immediate visibility and strategic placement.

Newsletters

Newsletters have massive potential to promote your business, sell your products, inform your potential customers, and retain existing customers. They can increase affiliate sales, market new products, or keep your customers informed of changes.
Newsletter can be an extremely powerful Internet marketing tool. Readers love to get something for nothing, especially information. By reducing the amount of advertising and increasing the amount of genuinely useful and informative newsletter content it is possible to build an email list that will continue to purchase from you for years to come. Newsletter design and newsletter content are equally important, both giving you the opportunity to maximize the effect of your marketing campaigns and subsequently make you more money.

Macro blogging

Macro blogging or Blogging is rapidly becoming a popular way to promote your on-line marketing. Each blog entry you make should include a hyperlink to your business site and should also include tags associated with the blog topic (which can also be connected with your business opportunity).
Every blog post has tags and all of the tags are keywords associated to the topic of your blog and thus your business, so your blog can enhance your search engine ranking. This is free advertising to your website. Every blog is accompanied by feedback and comments (user generated content) about that blog. Either positive or negative comments both are beneficial to you. The more visits to your site, the more you are marketing your business and gaining credibility.

Micro blogging
Micro blogging is an innovative way of blogging, this type refers to short written texts of about 140 words that is published online and viewed by all or to a restricted few. Most uniquely, the brief blogs, in the form of messages, can be imparted even through a number of means such as instant messaging, email, text messaging, MP3 and of course on the web.
In fact, the business world, micro blogging way to best suit the client-based interaction. This can be done in a number of effective and useful ways. For example, with this particular technique, the companies can keep in touch with their clients, informing them with the constant developments. In this way, the companies can also declare discounts and offers to the blog readers across the web. At times, customers may prefer to talk to any particular staff of their choice. Micro blogging makes the job easier to know whether the staff is available online or not get a more honest feedback Besides these, there are many other applications of the very concept of the ultra micro blogging that is already taking the business and social world by storm.
How will writing macro blogs help you improve your business?
When you put your content related to your business opportunity on Twitter and other micro blogging sites like Pownce, Tumblr, and Jaiku, Google’s spiders follow…your pages will get indexed…your websites will rank…and you’ll make more business.
User generated content (UGC)
It is the content that users (or consumers) write and submit online and can be
• Product reviews (e.g. Amazon.com)
• Service reviews (e.g. Google Local)
• Seller reviews (e.g. ebay)
• Blog comments
• News comments
• Forum posts or comments
• Video/Audio and Photo sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Flickr)
• Social networking sites comments or posts (e.g. Twitter, SecondLife, Facebook)
• Wikis
• Composite review sites (e.g. ConsumerReport.org)

Why UGCs are important in internet marketing?
There are several reasons. They are:
• Consumers are relying more and more on UGC.
• Marketers are relying more and more on UGC
• UGC Influences Offline Commerce
• Not only positive but Negative Reviews are also actually of interest
• Negative reviews provide helpful feedback to consumers and R&D
• Negative Reviews provide authenticity
• Positive Reviews Outweigh Negatives

If you sell products and services, and if you have a web site, make sure you allow for reviews. If your products are great to mediocre, you should get far more positive than negative feedback, and a resultant positive impact on sales and revenue.
Therefore, make sure you enable and allow feedback, optimize your review pages, and get traction for them in the search results by supporting brand evangelists, and answering detractor issues promptly and diplomatically.

Affiliates networks
Building your online business with an affiliate network allows you to reach affiliates and customers across the globe. You are able to market your products across the globe. This is very favorable for search engine optimization.
Affiliate network marketing is a combination of network marketing and affiliate marketing. This type of marketing involves selling of products and services to consumers through a wide network of independent distributors.
After you sell the products or services to distributors, they in turn can sell to other marketers. You earn commissions for your sales. Additionally, you also earn for sales through marketers under you to a certain extent. This is affiliate networking and marketing.
Backlinkings

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query
A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater is their quality. Ideally backlinks are web pages with high PageRank, with content like yours and that already link to other web pages.
Reciprocal links: if you enter a link exchange program with the so called bad neighbors and you link to them, this can be disastrous to your SEO efforts.
Paid links:
Paid links certainly have their place. For a lot of sites, this place has proven to be in an SEO campaign. Care should be taken when buying text links for SEO, that the link is a genuinely powerful addition to your marketing campaign without relying on it to improve your search engine ranking. Check page popularity and relevance, link placement, and ensure that the link cost and results offer a good enough ROI to justify the purchase of the link in the first place. Paid links could provide you with good traffic if you find the right ones at the right price.

Directory listing
To enhance the search engine rankings, it is important to list your website in various directories; it also helps your website to come in the top search engine results of all major search engine results like Google, Yahoo and MSN.
The higher the PR of the directory, the more benefit you will get to get your directory listed in that directory. Directories are useful to the user in that if a user wanted to find a site under a particular topic, it would be easy to go to the appropriate category and choose from the selection of links. All links in a web directory are well-categorized and meaningfully sorted out.

Listing in Dmoz (Open Directory Project)
Now owned by Time Warner, the Open Directory Project, is the single most important and powerful of all the directories edited by humans. The results from this high-quality directory are also carried directly by Google (where they are listed in a different order, according to Google Page Rank). There are numerous advantages of submitting your directory to DMOZ, and I can't think of a single drawback.
It may take many months to secure a listing, and there is no guarantee that your site will be listed at all. Google takes DMOZ listings very seriously, and in fact they even make it known that if you've had difficulty getting listed in Google, one of the best ways of remedying that is to get your site listed with the Open Directory Project.
Directory submissions, unlike search engine submissions, are reviewed by human beings and undergo a great deal of scrutiny by the editors reviewing them. It is important that your website is submitted correctly in order to obtain the listings you need.
Listings in DMOZ (Open Directory Project) and the Yahoo! Directory can be very helpful for boosting your site in the search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN view websites listed in these directories as more important than those which are not.

The future of internet marketing
As more people join up with digital riot, e-commerce continues to grow. Still, one can’t help but acknowledge Internet users are becoming more refined, particularly as a younger generation moves into adulthood.
Specially in this time of recession one cant avoid internet marketing as it’s the cheapest and most effective way of marketing which target people across the globe. The future of internet marketing looks very promising.
Happy internet marketing!!!

Importance of Page rank for website

Page Rank (often denoted by PR) is Google’s ranking software that calculates the relevance of a webpage with its content. Page Rank is a quantity (between 0 and 10) defined by Google that provides a rough estimate of the overall importance of a web page.

Page Rank is displayed as a green bar to the left of a webpage listing in the Google Directory, and also in the Google toolbar
The basic factor behind defining a page rank is the keywords
• If your keywords are Rare and Unique, then Page Rank doesn't matter.
• If your keywords are very Competitive, then Page Rank becomes very important

There are "over 200 SEO factors" that Google uses to rank pages in the Google search results (SERPs). There are certain google search engine optimization rules which effects the page rank they are

1. Positive ON-Page SEO Factors.

2. Negative ON-Page SEO Factors.

3. Positive OFF-Page SEO Factors.

4. Negative OFF-Page SEO Factors.

Some of these factors are listed below:
POSITIVE ON-Page SEO Factors:
• Keyword
o Keyword in URL: First word is best, second is second best, etc
o Keyword in domain name: Same as in page-name-with-hyphens
o Keyword in title tag: Title tag 10 - 60 characters, no special characters.
o Keyword in description meta tag: less than 200 chars. Google no longer "relies" upon this tag, but will often use it.
o Keyword in keyword meta tag: less than 10 words. Every word in this tag MUST appear somewhere in the body text. If not, it can be penalized for irrelevance. No single word should appear more than twice.
If not, it may be considered spam. Google purportedly no longer uses this tag, but others do.
o Keyword density in body text:5- 20% - (all keywords/ total words)
o Individual keyword density: 1 - 6% - (each keyword/ total words)
o Keyword in H1, H2 and H3: Use Hx font style tags appropriately
o Keyword font size: "Strong is treated the same as bold, italic is treated the same as emphasis".
o Keyword in alt text: Should describe graphic - Do NOT fill with spam
o Keyword in links to site pages (anchor text): Links out anchor text use keyword
• NAVIGATION - INTERNAL LINKS
o Link should contain keywords.
o Use hyphenated filenames, but not long ones - two or three hyphens only.
o Check that all Internal links are valid or not.
• NAVIGATION - OUTGOING LINKS
o External link: Link only to good sites
o Validate all links periodically
o Less than 100 links out total
o Avoid "Link Churn"
o Outgoing link Anchor Text : Should be on topic, descriptive
• OTHER ON-Page Factors
o Smaller files are preferred, Try not to exceed 100K page size
o Use Hyphens in URL
o Freshness of Pages: Changes over time, Newer the better - Google likes fresh pages.
o Freshness of Links: Excellent for high-trust sites, May not be so good for newer, low-trust sites
o Frequency of Updates: Frequent updates are equal to frequent spidering that generates newer cache.
o URL length: Keep it minimized - use somewhat less than the 2,000 characters allowed by IE - less than 100 is good, less is even better
• OTHER ON-SITE Factors
o Site Age: Old is the best
o Site Size - Google likes big sites
o Age of page vs. age of site: Newer pages on an older site will get faster recognition

Negative ON-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors

• Text represented graphically is invisible to search engines.
• Too high keyword repetition (keyword stuffing) may get you the Over Optimization Penalty.
• Redirect thru refresh metatags: Don't immediately send your visitor to another page other than the one he/ she clicked on, using meta refresh.
• Keyword dilution: Targeting too many unrelated keywords on a page, which would detract from theming, and reduce the importance of your REALLY important keywords.
• Flash page : Most SE spiders can't read Flash content Provide an HTML alternative, or experience lower SERP positioning.
• Use of frames should be avoided as SE has problems with frames.
• Excessive JavaScript should not be used.
• Invisible text Google advises against this.
• Gateway, doorway page Google advises against this.
• Duplicate content Google advises against this
• HTML code violations Google advises against this


POSITIVE OFF-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors
Incoming links :
• Based on the Number and Quality of links to you Google link reporting continues to display just a SMALL fraction of your actual backlinks, and they are NOT just greater than PR4 - they are mixed.
• Incoming links from high-ranking pages are better.
• Site Age - Old shows stability.
• Site Directory - Tree Structure.
• Complete - keywords in anchor text.
• PAGE METRICS - USER BEHAVIOR:
o Page traffic: trend of number of visitors.
o CTR: how often is the page clicked on.
o Time spent on page: Relatively long time, indicates relevance hit.
o If your website pages are bookmarked by user it is good for you.
• SITE METRICS- USER BEHAVIOR
o Site traffic: number of visitors are more its better.
o Time spent on domain: relatively long time indicates relevance hit.
• DOMAIN OWNER BEHAVIOR :
o Domain Registration Time: Register for 5 years, Google knows you are serious, register for 1 year, is it a throw-away domain?

NEGATIVE OFF-Page SEO Google Ranking Factors
• Traffic Buying is not suggested
• Old links are valued, new links are not.
• Zero links to you: You MUST have at least 1 (one) incoming link (back link) from some website somewhere, that Google is aware of, to REMAIN in the index.
• Google hates link-buying, because it corrupts their PR model in the worst way possible. Please check all these points before creating links:
1. Does your page have links it really doesn't merit?
2. Did you get tons of links in a short time period?
3. Do you have links from high-PR, unrelated sites?
• Cloaking (practice of presenting different content or URLs to users and search engines.) should be avoided as Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index.
• Links from bad neighborhoods: Google says that incoming links from bad sites can't hurt you, because you can't control them.

So we can say that the page rank is the function of page,
• Strong on page gives better page rank and strong off page is added advantage
• If off page is very strong and on page is bad then page rank will be very poor
• If on page is strong and off page is poor, then PR will not be that badly affected

What is the need to outsource SEO

As outsourcing is the key of the day in the IT sector whereby customers can get highly professional results and yet save on the cost significantly, Outsource SEO services will surely be a great opportunity for such customers to get the best of the both the worlds. But everyone should know what are the benefits of outsourcing SEO
Lets see
1. Capacity of handling large project: SEO companies have the capability of handling large and small business house's SEO projects. They can also work on numerous projects simultaneously. They satisfy their client's requirements and demands. Any SEO Company can be easily located and you can contact them for the service you need.
2. Affordable rates: Companies can get services at most affordable rates. They offer many options related to SEO service .There are many SEO experts in a SO company. If you hire a SEO company you needn't to worry about your website. There are a number of seo services that are provided by SEO companies.
3. More businees more money: Outsourcing SEO will definitely upswing your performance in the web and you will surely get some extra edge in your online business.
4. Keep track of your business: You can keep track your sites improvement and get the report of the actions performed on your website monthly, quarterly or in whatever manner you think convenient for you.
5. Maintain higher standards: Nowadays companies have been focusing heavily on quality work that meets the international standards like ISO & SEI-CMM. SEO companies nowadays are becoming a powerhouse for providing quality work to the customers.
6. Targeting high quality audience: At the end of the day its business which really matters so getting audience who are really interested in that is essential, seo takes care of targeting high quality audience who will increase your business.
7. Global branding of your product/ services: Internet marketing is an effective way to brand your business globally. So that your business will be known to the world and your brand can be established.
8. Many services in one package: SEO companies provide many services like intense keyword research, blog and articles submission, relevant directory submissions/ backlinking, keyword rich content optimization and other internet marketing related services.

At this time of recession most of the companies are struggling for their existence. Getting business is becoming crucial. During this time online marketing is the only affordable way to be there in the market and get good business. For that outsourcing SEO is very essential.
India has become a best opted place for outsourcing SEO services. In India companies can obtain services at most affordable rates. India offers many options related to SEO service. We have many SEO experts in India.
There are a numerous factors that make India a perfect place for SEO Services. Indian government has also impacted in a positive way to make it an IT hub for rest of the world. All big players of IT are functioning in India and opened their offices at many locations in India. Google and Microsoft are well known among them.

How Search Engine Works

Introduction


User generated content, social networks and virtual media are rapidly replacing the way how traditional marketing works. And companies have already begun using the bandwagon of social media and SEM (search Engines marketing), to reach their niche business. As they are highely interactive and sensitive in nature, its equally important to understand and use them effectively. Now, the next step in the evolution to market directly is to learn how these search engines works.

There is no doubt that Google is the leader in search today, however Yahoo, MSN and AOL contribute up to 40% of the search engine market. It’s a known fact that, search engines display only top ten results in their first page and most searchers tend to click on the top few results. As pointed by Aaron Wall in SEO basics, “if you rank at the top business is good, but if you are on the second or third page you might only get 1% of the search traffic that the top ranked site gets”. Hence, it’s very important to get the basics right before marketing online. He also identifies the two most powerful aspects of search engine marketing:

• Users type what they want to find into search boxes, making search engines the most precisely targeted marketing medium in the history of the world.

• Gaining traction in the search results allows small business to compete with large corporations, with much ease.

Unlike traditional medium online is very transitory in nature, every five minutes there is something new and search engine factors changes constantly, But there are few things about search engines that are basic.
Below listed are some of the findamental SEO basics about popular search engins, pointed out by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin in their book “Search Engine Optimization an hour a day”.

Google Basics
URL www.google.com
Percent of search traffic 58.4%
Primary results Robot crawler
Organic listing also influenced by Open directory
Ways to submit your site XML site map, or wait for the robot to find the site
Keep an eye on Google analytics




Yahoo Basics
URL www.yahoo.com
Percent of search traffic 22.9%
Primary results Robot crawler
Organic listing also influenced by Yahoo! directory
Ways to submit your site Paid submittal to Yahoo directory, XML site map, or wait for the robot to find the site
Keep an eye on Yahoo! Go, Alibaba








MSN Basics
URL www.yahoo.com
Percent of search traffic 22.9%
Primary results Robot crawler
Organic listing also influenced by Open directory
Ways to submit your site Submit URL form, XML site map, or wait for the robot to find the site
Keep an eye on Major acquisitions and Gatineau web analytics




AOL Basics
URL www.aol.com
Percent of search traffic 4.6%
Primary results Google results
Organic listing also influenced by None
Ways to submit your site Get indexed through Google
Keep an eye on Future partnership deals



There are radically different opinions about these search engines, their algorithm and raking factors. However, some elements that strongly influence organic ranking include:


- HTML page titles, description and keywords
- Page content in compliance with the metas and over all theme of the page
- Relevant alt text that support the web content
- Number of inbound links and
- The number of relevant outbound links referring to the web page
- Easy navigation and image sizing
- Site authority, Age and
- Transparency also influences the organic ranking.


It’s true that it takes more efforts to rank well in organic search results. But, its low cost, high relevancy and high conversion rates make SEO an ideal marketing tool for almost any business. Since it’s an ever changing medium it’s very important to track what’s new in the online world to stay on “TOP”.

WOMM (word of mouth marketing)

It’s quite a rare sight to see someone glance through news papers. Magazines have almost become a leisure time activity. People are dwelling more on ad skipping digital video recorders and music players. In fact with the aid of new gadgets, they pick and choose their media exposure. Precisely, consumers are getting harder and harder to target. So, where is the new market ascending? What is the new strategy that rules the market?

As more and more people spend their time online the marketers need to find them in their space rather than dwelling in the traditional media. The new watch word for marketing strategist is now ‘WOMM’ (word of mouth marketing). It’s true that word of mouth marketing is emerging as a new force, over powering all other marketing strategies.

‘WOMM’ has got nothing to do with propaganda, advocacy or advertisement. In the marketing world conversation plays an integral part. And these new media sites focus on conversation as their integral part. For better or for worse people talk about products, events etc no one can stop that. So, here is the key for the new WOMM. Monitoring and harnessing these interactive platforms leverage the extra mile which marketers are longing for. WOMM can be of different kinds it can be a viral, a buzz or even a simple comment in social networking site or a blog. WOMM targets the complete social networking and conversation sites on the web.

The key elements of WOMM are:

• Research on the space (where the target audiences meet and exchange queries and thoughts)
• Communicate your product in the right network
• Monitor and respond to all the necessary conversations

The best part about WOMM is that you spend less and reap more profits. Marketing in these social networking sites doesn’t cost a huge sum. Hence, consumer generated content is yet another powerful to widen the market presence

To know more about WOMM can help you improve your business contact Himshilp

SEO Techniques for Yahoo & MSN

Google, Yahoo and MSN are the most preferred search engines. And it’s a know fact that each engine adapt their own techniques and methods in crawling and indexing the web pages. Hence, if we want a site to be indexed by all these search engines. It is important to understand the commonality shared by them and optimize the pages generically.

Title Tag
The title tag has been and probably will always be one of the most important factors in achieving high search engine rankings.
Yahoo displays up to the first 112 characters of the page's "title" tag in their search results.
MSN displays up to the first 70 characters found in the "title" tag in the search results.
Title Tags Containing Specific Keyword Phrases are preferred by search engines.

H1/ H2 Tags
H1 & H2 headings are heavily weighed element in search engine optimization.
Yahoo and MSN gives preferences to the header tags which carries key words.

Key words
Tight focus on keywords is the key to a successful phrase selection by engines.
Breaking the topic into its basic elements and make a page for each will give better results.
Zero in on a very specific niche or description by using different combinations of keywords will help in better optimization.
Yahoo likes keyword rich content. The keyword tag should start with the key phrase and then all following words or phrases should be ordered according to their relevance to the website.
Yahoo works on exact match i.e. they recognize only an exact keyword or key phrase: "magazine" on "magazine”;” American magazine" on "American magazine”; “magazines" for instance represents completely another.
MSN Search places heavy emphasis on content. They even allow higher keyword density than Google does. Unlike Yahoo, MSN and Google work on partial matching. The general rule is that, the closer you place your keyword to the beginning of the "title" tag; the better is the ranking advantage.

Meta Tags
Meta tags have never been a guaranteed way to gain a top ranking on crawler-based search engines. Today, the most valuable feature they offer the web site owner is the ability to control to some degree how their web pages are described by some search engines. They also offer the ability to prevent pages from being indexed at all.
Yahoo's spidering process analyzes these Meta tags and uses them to determine rankings. Make sure your Meta tags include popular keywords that are relevant to your site's content.
MSN gives due credit to Meta tags and their algorithm appears to place some solid weight on the use of Meta tags. To take full advantage of Meta tag use, be sure to have some unique meta tags for every page. Do not use the same Meta tags for all of your web pages.

Back links
Search Engine often uses the number of backlinks that a website has as one of the factors for determining that website's search engine ranking. Websites often employ various techniques (called search engine optimization) to increase the number of backlinks pointing to their website.
There are various factors for determining the quality of a back link. Main factor is the page rank of the web page giving the back link. Back link from high ranked site is of good quality. Second factor is the subject of the pages which are linked by a back link. If both sites are discussing the same topic, the back link is relevant and of good quality. Third important thing is the anchor text of the back link. If the anchor text is related to the theme of the website (where the link is pointing), then it is called a good quality back link. A good quality back link will increase the page rank of your website.
When you observe the top ranked sites in Yahoo, it is obvious that the sites have a large number of back links leading to that site.
One of the ways to secure high ranking in MSN is to get your site registered in internet directory listings. In the earlier days of MSN it would have been the wisest choice to get yourself listed in Zeal/ looksmart, as MSN used these listings.

Alt text
Optimizing images is becoming more and more important in SEO for websites.
Adding ALT tags to the images on your site can make your content friendlier to Yahoo's indexing process.
MSN gives more weightage to short key words in Alt text.

However the underlining fact is that all these search engines strive to produce ‘Relevant Results’ which should be the key for optimizing.