I've been optimising a site for google over the past few weeks and noticed the other day that it's now actually ranking #1 & #2 in yahoo for a competitive 2 word term in the pet products market. Great as a side product i guess. However, the traffic the site is generating from this term is tiny, unbelievably small. It just made me wonder, does anybody aim to rank well in Yahoo rather than Google?
Google has the traffic so you target them. Good SEO principals work for all sites. So keep doing what you are doing.
It seems pointless to target Yahoo! over Google unless you specifically gain more traffic through them, which would be unheard of.
It is easier for a newer site to rank higher in yahoo IMO. If someone wants to try to rank higher for a heavily searched keyword then yahoo may be a little easier. I don't see a benefit in doing that though
Unless it is significantly easier to get indexed and ranked on Yahoo, which has not been my experience at all, it's all about numbers, isn't it? At last count, Yahoo held only a 16% share of SE use in the US and less than 8% worldwide, compared with Google's 65% and 68%, respectively (see http://searchenginewatch.com/3634991 and http://searchenginewatch.com/3634922). If Yahoo happens for you, great, but I wouldn't waste my time focusing on it.
I have the same problem rank high in yahoo and bing for the word i am targeting in google but they bring a tiny amount of traffic.
From what I've seen Yahoo also favors sites heavily with the keyword in the title, url, and headers on the page. Link equity helps a ton in Yahoo obviously, but the basic onpage stuff can make a difference in Yahoo, especially in lower competition areas.
I don't think anyone would not consider Yahoo at all. However optimise for Google and all other search engines fall into place.
I think most people don't willingly target Yahoo ahead of Google. Sometimes it happens that you just rank better on Yahoo.
Google produces about 4 times more traffic than yahoo in my keyword genre but getting 1st in yahoo is way much easier and faster than getting 1st on google. So I tend to look at yahoo as step 1 to tackle down , bing as step 2 and by the time I tackle bing , my google ranks are already pretty high =]