Yahoo Submission Guide

Getting listed on Yahoo should be one of the most
important missions for any Internet marketer.

Yahoo is the largest search engine. Actually, that's not
true. 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 search engines and directories, like
Yahoo.

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 who do searches on the
Internet use Yahoo, everyone on the Internet has done
searches at one time or another.

Nothing in the world should be clearer to anyone with a
website after reading the above figures -- you need your
site listed on Yahoo. A.S.A.P.

RECAP

If your site is not listed in the YAHOO INDEX, you are
losing lots of potential customers to competitors whot are
listed with 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 of lost
profits.

Note - being listed under "webpages" does not mean you are
listed in Yahoo. It means you are listed with Google.
Yahoo gets its "webpage" results from Google.

How to submit to Yahoo:

First you have to determine the scope of your site. Is
your site commercial or non-commercial? Commercial sites
that want to be listed 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 tells you the
reason you have been rejected. 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. It should be quick loading and
should have lots of content.

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

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 your submittal for each one. First up category
selection: Many people don't realize this but when someone
searches for a term(s) on Yahoo, it's algorithm searches
through the category name also. For example, visit
www.yahoo.com and you will see the results for a search
on 'Internet Marketing'. 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,
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
local visitors from Yahoo.

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.

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 means less work for them. However if you
follow the above guidelines and Yahoo's own onsite
guidelines, chances are you won't be edited very much.

The description part 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. Make it sound very appealing to potential
visitors at the same time. However, you must avoid
anything that resembles hype and bragging, for example -
number 1 site on the net for... The best on the web
for...

Yahoo will either edit this kind of language to something
that doesn't benefit you at all or worse... just move on to
the next application. 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 if you exaggerate, your site will not be
approved. It's as simple as that.

The length of the description should be about 10 - 15
words. Note: On the Yahoo submittal form, they say 25 is
the maximum. Never go near this number; they are sure
to edit it and probably remove your keywords. Refer to
Yahoo's own words: "Please be brief"

SIDENOTE

Sometimes people email me asking this question: "Does the
title and description that I submit to Yahoo have to be
the same as the Meta description tag and title tag on my
site". The simple answer is: NO!

Have an "about us" page on your site - Yahoo likes to
know who it is dealing with. On this page describe what you
do honestly and also post the physical address of your
organization.

IMPORTANT

Don't Spam Yahoo. If they notice you submitting your site
more than every 2 or 3 months, they will just forget about
you and move on.

Good luck in your quest for Yahoo success!