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:
1) category,
2) title,
3) description, and
4) 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
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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.