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'.
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, the
main body of this Yahoo submitting tips article - how to submit to
Yahoo.
Well first you have to determine the scope of your site. Is your site
commercial or non-commercial? 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 week's
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 includes 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 non-commercial 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 have 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) 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.
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 can't
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 that 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 a real person reviews
your site 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 key phrase
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 your 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 - I hope you enjoyed reading this Yahoo submitting tips
articles as much as I enjoyed reading it. Good luck in your quest for
Yahoo success
Article by David Callan - admin@akamarketing.com David is the webmaster
of http://www.akamarketing.com. Visit his site for free internet
marketing articles, advice, ebooks, news and lots more.
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