The basic criterion used to return relevant search results for a specific user query is more or less similar for every search engine. Websites having relevant content and appropriate usage of keywords primarily in the title tags, meta tags and web page body usually achieve decent rankings in the search engine results pages. However on a micro level there are differences in the ranking algorithm of Google and Yahoo or any other search engine. Following are few ways of improving the search results of a website in Google and Yahoo

Keyword Analysis: Keyword selection should be based on two parameters; (A) The popularity of the keyword and (B) The relevance of the keyword with the website content.

Appropriate use of the keywords: There are many parameters that are taken into consideration by a search engine to rank a specific page. However presence of targeted keywords in the title tags, meta tags, anchor texts, backlinks of the webpage and headers tags (h1-h6) improves the chance of ranking high for the specific keyword query.

Page Rank: This algorithm was developed by Google to judge a websites quality. The concept of page rank is based on the premise that a good webpage will have other pages linking to it because its content has been found useful by those websites. The calculation of the page rank of a particular site depends on the page rank and relevance of the web pages linking to it.

Importance of Inbound Links :Incoming links from authoritative websites like well known media sites, educational institutions, non profit organizations, government websites and other related sites rank very high in google preference list.Links from .edu, .Gov and .org web sites are considered to be more authoritative and relevant than others Google Page rank Relevance: Page rank is very important for Google when it comes to analyzing a websites relevance for a keyword. Apart from it a high PR site improves the crawlability of its internal pages. The higher the Page Rank the better chance of the site to come on top of search engine listings if everything else remains the same . Directory Listings: A website should be listed in directories like Dmoz and Yahoo directory. The inclusion in a directory depends on the scrutiny of the website by human editors and thus only quality sites get listed in the above mentioned directories. Google does not have a directory of its own, so it takes help from Dmoz to generate directory results. On the other hand Yahoo directory forms an integral factor in achieving high positions in Yahoo search. Getting listed in a directory can take anything from 3-6 months but it definitely helps in achieving good positions in the search engines.