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Six Ways Into Yahoo

Yahoo was started in 1994 by two college students named David Filo and Jerry Yang. They started Yahoo as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Never did they imagine that their online ventures would turn into one of the most recognized brands on the Internet.

The Yahoo directory quickly gained popularity as the hot sport for finding
useful Web sites. In the fall of 1994, they had their first million-hit day, translating
to almost 100 thousand unique visitors. Today they are one of the top sites on the internet, receiving over 345 million visitors every month.

Through the years, Yahoo has gone through a number of face-lifts. You can see a visual history using the WayBack Machine. Yahoo has now expanded into one of the largest portals online, offering everything from shopping, video, and podcasts to finance, news, real estate,and personals.

Along with this expansion has come many additional opportunities for web masters to distribute their content. Many web masters today are constantly worried about their rankings in Yahoo. However, there are a number of other ways to get into Yahoo besides the Yahoo Search Engine.

In this article, we will discuss 6 ways that you can syndicate your content within the
Yahoo portal.

mobile site submission
podcast submission
product submission
Yahoo directory submission
media rss feeds
Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Mobile Site Submission

Yahoo, Google, and MSN now provide many options for the mobile browser. With cell-phones far out numbering computers, this user-base is one that is far too lucrative to pass up. It’s time we developed our sites for the communication revolution that we are living in and this means preparing our web sites to be easily viewable on very small screens.

Mobile web sites come in three flavors: xHTML, WML, or cHTML. To submit your mobile site for inclusion in Yahoo’s mobiles search index, simply enter the URL on their submission page. Only the top-level page is needed, the Yahoo Crawler will explore the rest of your site from there.

Podcast Submission

In 2005, the term “podcast” was declared Word of the Year by the New Oxford American
Dictionary. According to Information Week podcast users are expected to reach 60 million by the year 2010. With these kind of numbers, it just makes sense to start implementing podcasting into your own marketing strategy.

Yahoo released their podcast directory in 2005 and is now one of the best places to submit your podcast and start picking up some extra subscribers. Simply go to http://podcasts.yahoo.com/publish to get started.

Product Submission

If you sell products, then they should defenitely be in the Yahoo shopping index
Yahoo’s merchants range from Dell to Amazon.com. This network puts you in front of millions of potential buyers. You pay only when a shopper clicks on a listing that takes them to your site. Your cost-per-click will vary depending on which category you are in. You can take a look at the pricing on their
rate card.

Media RSS Feed

The Internet is no longer a world of text. With increasing bandwith becoming rapidly available at affordable prices, audio, video, and other visual content is becoming increasingly popular.

As the variety of conent has increased online, Yahoo has been continually adapting. They now allow you to search specifically for audio and video within their search engine.

If you are looking to increase your web site’s traffic, creating audio and video content for your web site could be the answer. The competition among these new
forms of media are still in their infancy.To get your audio, video, and other visual content into Yahoo, you can submit it via a media RSS feed. Yes, I know, it sounds very technical, but it’s really not all that bad.

To start marketing with new media types, go to http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/mrss.

Yahoo Directory

The benefits of being listed in the Yahoo directory have been strongly debated among online marketers.

However, submitting your site to directories does provide you with a number
of benefits. One of the most important benefits is that they grow the number of quality
one-way links coming to your site, which is one of the most important ranking factors
in many search engines.

Unlike Yahoo’s search engine, their directory is maintained by human eiditors.
When submitting to the Yahoo directory, preparation is the key. Be sure to read their
guidelines before you get started.

So, what’s the catch? Yahoo! Directory Submit charges a recurring annual fee of US$299 for each directory listing that is submitted, so you will have to decide for yourself whether or not the hefty price tag is worth it.

Yahoo Answers

Yahoo! Answers was launched on December 8, 2005. It is a community where anybody can ask and answer questions on a variety of topics. However, it is also an online community and social networking service. Questions range from the trivial, such as “When was kleenex invented?” to more serious ones like ” Where can I submit press releases on the web?”. Last month, Yahoo Answers reached 10 million answers posted.

Because this is such a large community, it is also one of the perfect mediums for delivering your marketing message. As an web master, you can establish yourself as an expert in almost any field by providing good answers to questions asked about topics related to your product or service.

Not only that, but you can also add more information about yourself or your company in your profile section. However, it is even more effective if you simply include a URL to your site in a resource box below your answers.

The key to using Yahoo Answers as a successful marketing medium is to
deliver quality content. If you do this, then people will certainly take notice.

Now that you know 6 additional ways into Yahoo, you should be able to start using
these techniques to gain an advantage over your competitors. There are so
many people who simply don’t put in the extra effort required to get exceptional
results.

For those who are constantly looking to improve, now is the time to
latch onto some of the most popular developments in internet marketing. Podcasting,
blogging, mobile search, and video have yet to see their peaks.

Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews and SEO-News
newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim @ seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification provided that the copyright notice and author information remain intact.

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Google, Yahoo - Search Tips and Shortcuts

A person could go myopic sifting through pages of search results from Google and Yahoo! I keep a bottle of eyedrops on my desk just for that reason. Unfortunately, nothing can restore the time I lose by a poorly structured search. In a perfect world, I could immediately guess the most effective keywords that might also be the exact keywords selected by a web developer to tell the search engines how to index a specific page. But, there is very little precision in language and, although choosing the right keywords might help lessen the strain on our eyes and our time, learning the capabilities of our favorite search engines will give us the best results.

For example, did you know that certain keywords, or rather “meta terms” trigger more optimized and immediate search results? Let’s say you want to know the current weather in El Paso, Texas. Enter the following as your search terms:

weather el paso

and immediately, you’ll see the temperature and forecast for that day. Here’s what Google showed me for June 20, 2006, as the top search result. With this information, I had no need to browse any of the other search results.

Weather for El Paso, TX, 93

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Search Engines & People Want The Same Thing

When your website visitors arrive, they are looking
for, and need to find, very specific things. They
enter your “front door” thinking:

1. “Make it quick, I don’t have time to waste.”

2. “Make it easy for me to understand the benefit.”

3. “Make it easy for me to reply.”

4. “Don’t let me down.”

Funny enough, or not so really, the MAJOR search
engines are looking for, and need to find, these same
“features” in order to give your website the thumbs up
and allow your webpage to be listed.

However, a search engine is much more specific in the
sense that the overall flow through of your website
must meet a particular set of criteria. To ensure
you’re on the right track with your current or soon to
be in existence website, let’s take a look at Google’s
Quality Guidelines.

Basic Google Search Engine Website Principles:

Make pages for users, not for search engines.

Don’t deceive your users, or present different content
to search engines than you display to users.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine
rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel
comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website
that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask,
“Does this help my users? Would I do this if search
engines didn’t exist?”

Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase
your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid
links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the
web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by
those links.

Don’t use unauthorized computer programs to submit
pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume
computing resources and violate our terms of service.
Google does not recommend the use of products such as
WebPosition Gold

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