The search engine optimisation community was expecting this bad news: Yahoo Site Explorer, maybe the most popular service for analysing backlinks of certain websites, it is to be closed somewhen this year. Offered for free for so many years, this online SEO tool was considered a great help when trying to create a “links profile picture” for competitors’ websites or when checking our own website’s backlinks.

Lately, many SEOs reported that Yahoo Site Explorer is updating its database way slower than before and this near closing-down seems to be the answer. After almost 6 years of being used by thousands of SEOs, Hemant Minocha (Product Manager for Yahoo Site Explorer) announced that later this year this popular product is to be discontinued.

Furthermore, you can read on Yahoo Search Blog the recommendations for anyone that was using YSE to sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools and use it accordingly. Problem with the Bing’s Tools is that it is almost a certain thing they will not reveal so many linking details on websites; however, only time will tell us how Microsoft’s Bing will improve and IF it will be improved (in terms of linking “exploration”).

You can still benefit from YSE for a couple of months and for now, the most “appropriate” SEO tools for analysing backlinks for a certain website seems to be those provided by Majestic SEO. Of course, this coming with a monthly fee which is quite high when talking about more than average linking data.

There are many ways in which you can increase the numbers of backlinks pointing to a certain website and in the same time drive direct traffic through to those links, but one of the most interesting strategies remains to be the Q&A websites. There are many quality ones available, among them the popular ones Answers.com, Yahoo! Answers and AOL Answers, these should be part of your “portfolio”.

But why do Q&A websites work? It seems that recently, more and more people ask this question on search engines instead of searching for the exact keyword. Example: instead of searching for “web design” more and more people are searching for phrases like “can you recommend me a cheap web design company?” You get the idea.

Two other major reasons why Q&A sites should be used in your Internet marketing strategies are:

1.      They have a massive amount of traffic

2.      They rank quite great in the search engines

Q&A sites are definitely a must for building backlinks and for building authority, but how to properly do this? Two great tips here:

1.      Think as your potential customer thinks

Think about what kind of questions a potential customer would ask. Try to find as many relevant questions as you might come up with, search for them in Google and start replying to those Q&A websites coming high in the SERPs.

2.      Q&A aggregators

There are many aggregators available like QuestionHub, use them to find relevant questions to your industry and become an authority in your niche.

A Lot of buzz lately in the online environment regarding Yahoo and some of its services that are about to be closed. It all started with a picture posted on Twitter by MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier in which some of Yahoo’s services seem to be on the edge of getting shut-down.

Del.icio.us is not the only service that is up to be closed, according to the leaked picture on the list there are other well-known services like MyBlogLog, AltaVista, Fire Eagle, Yahoo Buzz and the Traffic APIs.

The picture is part of an internal slideshow that was given to Yahoo employees and it’s made of three parts : the Sunset, the Merge and the Make Feature. The former employee’s picture was strengthened by other Yahoo employees that confirmed the image on Twitter, however they seem to be close to being fired, according to Yahoo Chief Product Officer Irving Blake’s tweet : “ Can’t wait to find out how you got the web cast. Whoever it is, gone! ”.

The picture says it all: on the sunset services we can see services like Yahoo Buzz (supposed to be a Digg challenger when it was launched), search engines Alta Vista and AllTheWeb (from Overture), social networking service MyBlogLog (overwhelmed by Facebook Connect) and Del.icio.us (a popular social bookmarking service).

However, whether these will be closed or sold is not certitude yet but it seems Yahoo is preparing to change things in its portfolio. On the last run, Liza Gannes from AllThingsD reported that the products featured in “sunset” are to be closed and not to be sold.

WebCreationUK is keeping an eye on this news and will certainly update this when official papers are to be launched.

With all the new features big fish like Google brings into the game it was just a matter of time until Yahoo! get more involved into social world and local search relevancy. Yesterday at the Web 2.0 Summit held in San Francisco, Yahoo! revealed a new range of products related to those above, like Twitter and Zynga integration to Yahoo!, YM beta (featuring new social enhancements), Yahoo! Local Offers program and the brand new local Search apps – and two days ago Yahoo! Contributor Network was launched – a service that allow people to publish content on Yahoo!.

Here are the new products and improvements Yahoo! is bringing into the game. Let’s start with the social ones:

-          Y!M Beta brings social games like Zynga and ELEX to its users, allowing people to share their status, comment and “like” on updates from Flickr or Facebook, all under the same roof; it can be downloaded and tested from the Yahoo! homepage

-          The Contributor Network allows people to publish their content, reaching a large online audience; whether the content is related to news, sports, finance and so on, this network has room for everyone

-          Yahoo! integrated with Zynga means users can play games like Mafia Wars on Messenger, Yahoo! Toolbar or Yahoo! Pulse

-          Twitter users will also be glad that they can connect their Twitter account with the Yahoo! one and share Twitter updates on Yahoo!’s services

The local features and improvements that Yahoo! are now offering are:

-          Local Offers program: this is limited only for US folk for now and it provides its users local deals and coupons from nearby service providers; among their partners we could see Groupon, Scoop St, Goldstar, Tippr, Valpak and so on, Yahoo! announced that more partners are to come in the near future

-          Locally “Quick Apps” helps people find restaurants they like locally; also this includes a new Yahoo! Sketch-a-Search for better viewing of the streets for local restaurants, this being available on PC, iPhones and iPads. Also, Yahoo! wants to allow people making restaurants’ reservations through OpenTable, right on the Search Results page

Seems like Yahoo! is trying to catch up with the latest features its competitors are bringing into the game. However, when it comes to social and local experience, they have a lot more work to do; the web designers at WebCreationUK are keeping an eye on their improvements and will surely share anything new with you on their web design blog.

If you’ve not already started to look at your Bing search engine strategy then the latest news from America offers a good prompt. It was recently announced that in the coming months Yahoo will be integrating Microsoft’s mobile organic and paid listings in the US and Canada.

Just now they are in a testing phase but it could be that the first organic search listings are rolled out in September. Yes, this is in America and it’s not happening today, but it means that Bing is likely to become a much bigger player in the search engine market and so it’s vital that all businesses being a Bing optimisation strategy.

Why not speak to WebCreationUK, a specialist in SEO and web design, to find out what they could do for you and your website?

If you’ve been wondering how on earth you should be writing your content for the web then perhaps the new Yahoo style guidebook will be exactly what you’ve been looking for. The guide has been called by Yahoo: “The Ultimate Sourcebook for Writing, Editing, and Creating Content for the Digital World”.

Yahoo believes this is the “best and most comprehensive manual for on-line editorial best practices to guide writers and editors”.

The style guide has been sourced from Yahoo’s own in-house style guide and addresses concepts such as: online writing, grammar and punctuation, site accessibility, minimising legal risk and improving your search ranking.

Yahoo believes the guide will appeal to a range of people, including journalists, bloggers, writers, technical writers, editors, students and business owners. You can find the book, which launches July 6, at styleguide.yahoo.com

Then again, if you are starting from scratch with your website content or if you know what you want to say but can’t somehow put this into writing maybe you should hire a professional website writer. WebCreationUK can put you in touch with their favourite web copywriters.