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SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)ARTICLES
Yahoo Submitting Guide
Getting listed on Yahoo should be without doubt the most important
mission on any Internet marketers mind.
Yahoo is the biggest of all the search engines, well actually that's
not true, you see Yahoo is not technically a search ENGINE it is a
human compiled directory of websites and does not have a spider bot
going to sites and indexing them. But for the sake of this article
when I say search engines I am referring to all 'search sites'.
Anyway as I was saying Yahoo is the biggest of all the search
engines, did you know that recent estimates show that Yahoo is
currently capturing an amazing 40% of all search engine traffic
online? Do you know what this means? That means that almost 1 out of
every 2 people that do searches on the Internet use Yahoo, everyone
on the Internet has done searches some time or another.
Nothing in the world should be clearer to anyone with a website whose
just after reading the above figures - you need your site listed in
Yahoo. A.S.A.P.
RECAP
If your site is not listed in the YAHOO INDEX, (note - being listed
under webpages does not mean you are listed in Yahoo, it in fact
means you are listed with Google because Yahoo gets webpage results
from google) you are losing lots of potential customers to
competitors that are listed in Yahoo. And with the amount of visitors
Yahoo can send you even with an average listing this could amount to
hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of lost profit.
Now you know how important it is, lets get on to the good stuff, how
to submit to Yahoo.
Well first you have to determine the scope of your site. Is your site
commercial or noncommercial? Commercial sites that want to be listed
by Yahoo now must use "Business Express" when submitting. This used
to cost $199, however the price has risen to $299 a year.
"Business Express" what is it? Good question and one that many people
ask, well it's basically the same as free submit except that with
business express your site is guaranteed to be reviewed within a
weeks time. However please be aware that it does not guarantee that
your site will be accepted and added to the Yahoo index. If your site
is rejected Yahoo will allow you to appeal for free within a certain
time scale (usually 30 days) of being informed of your rejection.
Also Yahoo staff usually include in your rejection the reason you
have been rejected, you should examine these reasons fix any problems
and resubmit after a week or so.
If your site is a noncommercial site, you will still be able to
submit for free, but a review could take as long as 8 weeks or might
never happen at all.
Before you submit make sure your site is 100% ready, under
construction pages need not apply to Yahoo because they are not going
to get in. Your site should be aesthetically pleasing to the
reviewer, be quick loading and of course should has lots of content.
OK lets get started. How does Yahoo return results? Well search
results on Yahoo are determined by words that appear within these
four areas:
- category,
- title,
- description, and
- URL.
These sites are then sorted by relevance using an
automated algorithm.
I will now go through these four different factors
and how to optimize you submittal for each one
First up category selection, many people don't realize
this but when someone searches for a term(s) on
Yahoo its algorithm searches through the category
name also, for example visit www.yahoo.com and you
will see the results for a search done on 'Internet
marketing articles'. You will see under each listing
that these words are highlighted if they are in
the name of the category, the top listing has the
most occurrences of these words between its title,
description, URL and words in the category its in.
You should remember this when submitting to your
category, when trying to establish what category
you are going to submit to you should do a search
for one or two of your keywords and see what categories
come up. But which of these categories do you submit
to?
Since most referrals to sites from Yahoo come from
the search results and not from people visiting
certain categories, it is wise and best (in most
occasions (I'll tell you why in a bit)) to submit
to a very specific category with lots of keywords
in the category name. To see this strategy in practice
revisit the results page for 'Internet marketing
articles' on Yahoo.com notice that the top ranked
site is in a category with lots of keywords, these
are: Internet, Business, Advertising and Web, these
combined with various keywords in the title, description
and URL combine to give this site a pretty good
chance at ranking well on a few good keywords and
phrases. Therefore category names are just like
having more titles and descriptions. Note - if you
are a regional operation try to pick a category
with the name of your state or province in it. This
will help you get targeted visitors from Yahoo.
Remember I said in most occasions a little higher
up the page, well here's why it's not the best policy
in all occasions. Imagine if your business name
or official website name began with an A or any
other alphabetically high character and someone
goes into a general high - level category and there
you are listed in the top few, you could receive
lots of traffic from your category listing like
this.
Basically what I'm saying here is that if the title
you are submitting (i.e.. Your official business
or website name) is alphabetically very high. Then
you'd want to compromise between a lower level very
specific keyword rich category and an upper level
more general category in the hope that you'd receive
more visitors because you would be listed high on
the page due to your alphabetically high title.
Personally I'd try to get into the most general
category possible on all occasions and rely on the
keywords in my title, URL, and description to get
a good ranking in search results.
As for the title Yahoo insists that you use your
official business or website name when applying
to them, if you submit some keyword rich title they
wont even look twice at your application. You should
take this into account when choosing a domain name/official
website name.
I did - AKA Marketing - 'A' is useful in getting
listed high in general categories as discussed earlier,
because AKA is an abbreviation I can 'get away'
with having AKA all caps which again helps with
the category strategy. Also it includes a good keyword
- Marketing and they cant accuse me of applying
to them with a keyword rich title, can they?.
Yahoo favors short titles, this stems from the fact
that the shorter the title is the less likely they
will be to edit it. Which means less work for them.
However if you follow the above guidelines and indeed
Yahoo's own onsite guidelines chances are you wont
get edited down.
The description part I think is the tricky part.
The Web site description posted with your URL is
a big factor in how your site will rank once it's
listed in the directory.
You have to submit a description which has your
main keywords in it, and make it sound very appealing
to potential visitors at the same time, however
you can't have anything that resembles hype and
bragging, for example - number 1 site on the net
for ... The best on the web for ...
Again Yahoo will either edit it to something which
doesn't benefit you at all or just move on to the
next application (most likely). If they do edit
it you can bet your keywords won't appear in the
final listing, for these reasons it is important
to get it right first time.
The description should be concise and based on facts,
most importantly it should include your most important
keywords whenever possible. Do not exaggerate what
is located on your site. Remember your site gets
reviewed by a real person and in the end, your site
will not get listed, simple as that.
The length of the description should be about 10
- 15 words. Note however on the Yahoo submittal
form, they say 25 is the maximum, never go near
this number, they are sure to edit it, a mess with
your keywords. Refer to Yahoo's own words "Please
be brief".
SIDENOTE
Sometimes people email me asking this question ''does
my title and description that I submit to Yahoo
have to be the same as the meta description tag
and title tag on my site''. Simple answer, NO!
We have already discussed most of the issues regarding
domain name choice and Yahoo above, however there
are others, most notable the whole 63 character
thing, this allows for very long keyword rich domain
names,if you decide to pursue this strategy, don't
go mad and use up nearly all 63 characters because
Yahoo reviewers wont like it, however do use long
domain names to your advantage. Get ones with your
main keyphrase in it, and have these words separated
by hyphens ( - ) because Yahoo's algorithm like
hyphens it may give you a rankings boost. Also remember
to try for alphabetically high domains, which are
plausible and make sense. If you can that is.
Some experts question the merit of keyword rich
domains as a way of gaining an advantage over other
sites in Yahoo, however I have seen this strategy
in action and it does give advantage, most of the
time it's only a slight advantage but we're talking
about Yahoo here, a small advantage can mean a lot
more visitors. To see why I believe in keyword rich
domains, go to Yahoo.com and enter in ''linking
strategies''. WHAT SITE COMES UP! . That was a very
good example wasn't it :-)
Other tips for Yahoo is to have an about us page
on you main page - Yahoo likes to know who it's
dealing with. On this page describe what you do
honestly and also post the physical address of your
business/building your website is run from.
IMPORTANT Don't under any circumstances spam Yahoo,
it they notice your submitting your site more than
every 2 or 3 months they will just forget about
you and more on.
Well that's it - Good luck in your quest for Yahoo
success.
----------------------------------
Article by David Callan
David is the webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com
Visit his site for free internet marketing articles,
advice, ebooks and more.
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