Yahoo! Express Program - Get Articles by Pia Sengupta |  |
> Get Articles > Search Engines and SEO > Yahoo! Express Program Yahoo! Express Program Download as PDFPia Sengupta piasenguptayahoo.com 1st Search Engine Placement http://www.1stSearchEnginePlacement.com 1st Search Engine Placement got accepted in the Yahoo! directory. Recently, I had submitted to the Yahoo! directory and recieved the acceptance letter within five business days. To say I am delighted is an understatement. Within the next 48 hrs, they included it in the Yahoo! search results. For those of you who haven't had any luck so far, don't give up yet! We will discuss the steps and tips to get a site listed in Yahoo!. Before we move on to Yahoo submission procedure, let us know a bit about the company. What is Yahoo dot com? Yahoo! is the abbreviation for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. Yahoo! is the #1 search directory on the net. Yahoo! holds 50% of the market and a listing is vital if you want to suceed. A listing in Yahoo can do wonders for your traffic. Company Information: Yahoo! was founded by Stanford Ph.D. students, David Filo and Jerry Yang in 1994. It began as their hobby and has evolved as the Internet's leading global consumer and business services company, reaching over 200 million unique users in 24 countries and 12 languages. Contact Information: By Post: 3400 Central Expressway, Suite 201, Santa Clara, CA 95051, USA By Phone (408) 731-3300 Office Hours (8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. PST) By Fax (408) 731-3301 The Yahoo! directory is created entirely by humans. It is run by team of 49 dedicated and sincere editors. Their aim is to build a great guide that lists resources from across the web and provide quality information to the users. Submitting your site to Yahoo A listing in Yahoo! can bring more traffic to your web site than all the search engines combined. Apart from this, getting listed in Yahoo! increase the link popularity of a site more than anything else. Yahoo has both a human-edited directory and a spider based index provided by Google. To get your site listed in the spider based index, one has to submit his site to Google. In order to get your site listed in the Yahoo! directory, one has to browse through the Yahoo! directory and find out to the appropriate directory for the site and use the "Suggest a Site" link for the submission. Let us have a look how Yahoo displays its results. There are 5 sections of Yahoo! results - Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, Related News and Events. The last two sections have got nothing to do with the topic of this months' newsletter. When someone is searching with a keyword, in the Categories section, it shows the similar categories in its directory. In the web sites section, it shows the web sites from its directory which are relevant to the search terms. The web pages section is provided by Google. By submitting a site to Yahoo!, it is meant that the site has to be present in the Yahoo! directory and if your url is searched it should be visible in the Yahoo! web sites section. There can be two ways to submit to the Yahoo! directory - the Standard submission or Express submission program. The Standard submission program is free of cost and sometimes involves waiting for months before a Yahoo! editor will visit your site. In this issue of the newsletter, we will discuss about the Yahoo Express program. The Express submission program costs $299 and it guarantees that your site will get reviewed with 7 days; however, it does not guarantee that your site will get into the directory or where it will be placed. In some of the categories, you will not find any provision for Standard submission. It is just because Yahoo! has made it mandatory that all commercial sites has to submit via the Express submission program and placed under the Business and Economy category. Before we start, follow the submission guide lines at http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/url and http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ Minimum criteria for Yahoo! submission: # the physical address of your business either in the home page of your site or in a separate Contact Us page which is linked prominently from the home page. # If the site is a commerical web site, the official business name must be visible to any visitor to that site; # The site must clearly define its purpose, products, and/or services; # The site must not already appear in the Directory; # The site must contain substantively unique content, as determined by Yahoo!'s editorial staff (for example, a user who submits multiple URLs to the same content is not submitting substantively unique content); # If the site is applicable to a specific geographic region, the address must be visible to any visitor to that site; # The site must not contain any parts under construction; # All links on the site must work (and must link to relevant content) # The site must be in the English language (or have an English version available); # The site must support multiple browsers and capabilities (e.g., no Java-only sites); # The site must be up and running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week; # there are no missing graphics # no links leading to empty or non-existent pages, # no "Under construction" symbols and no typos or grammatical errors. Before, you even think again of submitting to Yahoo!, fix your site to satisfy the above-mentioned minimum criteria. Steps for Yahoo submission: 1. Choosing the appropriate category for your site 2. Creating a title for your site 3. Creating a description for your site 4. Submitting from the appropriate category Step 1. Select the two most important keyword applicable for your site. Search with those keywords in Yahoo! and make a list of the catgories displayed in the search results. Visit those categories to find out whether the web sites listed in those are similar to yours. In most cases you will find only one category which contains similar to yours. In case, you find more than one category containing web sites, similar to yours then choose the category containing the minimum number of websites. Keep a note of url the category from the address bar. Step 2. While submitting your web site to Yahoo, it ask from you a title for your site. Note that this title is not the title that you use in the title tag of your web pages. The title that you provide Yahoo! should be the official name of your business. It should be written exactly as it is there in the web site. Step 3. Yahoo! asks for a description of your web site. Again, note that the description you provide to Yahoo! is not the description that you write in the description tag of the web pages. This description should be able to tell the surfers what your site is all about and how is it different from others. Rules for writing a description: + Avoid repeating the site title or category name in the description. + Do not use all capital letters. + Please do not capitalize the first letter of every word. (except for proper nouns). + Do not include HTML tags. + Please refrain from using marketing slogans such as, "We're Number One" or "The Best Site on the Internet!" Anything that could be construed as marketing language should be avoided in the comment. + It is advisable to write the description in third person. + Please do not submit a description that is full of keywords. Such requests will not be processed. + Limit your description to a maximum of 10 words. + Do not include brand names in your description. Example: "We have Rolex, Timex, and Tag Heuer watches". + End the description with a full stop. + the first character of your description should be in lowercase. + absolutely no grammatical mistake or spelling mistakes. In order to get a higher ranking in Yahoo! it is advisable to include the keyword in the description of your web site, preferably towards the beginning. A few of these rules are directly from the Yahoo! site and some of them are here from my own experience in the field of Yahoo submission. REMEMBER, all the above mentioned rules are carved in stone and the Yahoo editors mean every word of these rules. Ignoring even one of them may result in the rejection of your web site. While writing the description, we should write in a way which describe your site best and should not give the Yahoo! editor a chance to edit it. Lets us analyze what we used while writing the description for our own web site. "offers search engine placement, ranking, and optimization services." We have written the description in third person. The first character is in lowercase. The most important keyword for our web site is "search engine placement", so we have placed in the beginning of the description. It also contains two other keywords, but not in a way as if a series of keywords but as a sentence. It is also limited to eight characters. Keep a note of the title and the description as well. Now that we have got the appropriate category, title and a suitable description, lets us get started with the actual submission process. As this is a very crucial step, I suggest you first rehearse the process with a imaginary site, which does not exist, say abcd.com. This is done to be aware of the situation or queries you may come across. First of all, create a Yahoo email id in order to use the Express program. If you already have one, you may use the existing one. Type mail.yahoo.com in the address bar and press enter to go to the Yahoo! mail page.You may login or create a new account to login. Type the url of the category that you have noted down in the address bar of your browser and go to that category. Click on the "Suggest a site" link at the bottom of the category. It takes you to another page. Here click on the "Yahoo! Express" button. The terms and conditions page of the Yahoo submissin program comes before you. In the "how to qualify" section read all the terms and announcement, click on all the check boxes, and click on the "Continue" button to go to the "Site and Contact Information" page. In this page enter the site title that you had already determined and noted down earlier. Enter the complete url of your site including the "http://", say http://www.abcd.com If your site offers service/product to a particular geographical region then mention the geographical region, else keep this field empty. Enter the description as you have created for your web site. If access to your site requires a login and password, please provide that information. Then provide the "Contact Information" of your site. Type in your name in the "Contact Person" and your e-mail address in the "Contact Email" field. This should be exactly the same as mentioned in the site. If you had decided more than one category for your web site, type in the category name in the additional information field. Click on the "Continue" button to enter the "Payment information" page of the Express program. Have a look at the information that you have to provide. Now that you are acquainted with the information that Yahoo! may ask, you can start wih your own site. When you have reached till this step, fill in the "Credit Card Information" and the "Billing Address". Click on the "Continue" button. This takes you to the "Payment Confirmation" page. This is the final step of the Yahoo! Express program. This page displays all the payment information that you have provided. If you feel any of the information is incorrect, click on "Edit Information" button, else click on the "Submit" button below ONLY ONCE, then wait patiently for your confirmation page. The confirmation page gives your order number. Note it down and also the date of submission and keep it in a secure place as as it is the only way they can track the progress of your request. Within a few minutes, you will receive a Order Confirmation from the Yahoo Team, with the subject "Yahoo! Express Order Confirmation". Now, wait patiently for seven business days, you will recieve a reply from the Yahoo! Team informing the acceptance or rejection of your web site. If you follow EVERYTHING mentioned in this article, there is a very little chance for your site to get rejected. If you have any queries about Yahoo! Express submission, send your queries at mailto:info1stSearchEnginePlacement.com How useful did you find this article? This article can be downloaded freely from http://www.get-articles.com and used on your website or in your ezine so long as the author is credited and their resource box left intact. You should not change any links in the article, and where the article is used on a website it's links should be clickable. Please see our terms and conditions page for more information: http://www.get-articles.com/authors-publishers-terms.php |
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