Yahoo Submitting Tips Part 2
by David Callan
OK let's get started. How does Yahoo return results?
Search results on Yahoo are determined by words that
appear within these four areas:
1) Category,
2) title,
3) description and
4) URL.
Websites which contain the search term within these
areas are sorted by relevance using an automated
algorithm.
I will now go through these four different factors and
explain how to optimize your submittal for each one.
First up is 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. To see this visit http://www.yahoo.com/ and do a
search 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 it's
in.
You should remember this when submitting to your
category. In 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. Which
of these categories do you submit to though?
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 http://www.yahoo.com/ and 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.
As a side note, if you're a regional operation try to
pick a category with the name of your state or province
in it. This will help you get more 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
sites, you could receive lots of traffic from a category
listing like this.
Basically what I'm saying here is that if the title
you're 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 the
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 won't 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. AKA is
an abbreviation so I can 'get away' with having AKA all
caps which again helps with the category strategy. 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. This of course means less work for them.
However if you follow the above guidelines and indeed
Yahoo's own onsite guidelines chances are you won't get
edited down, but don't take my word for it.
Continue to Yahoo
Submitting Tips - Part 3
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