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YAHOO, ODP, GOOGLE, AND PAID LISTINGSYahoo
Yahoo is by far the most important place to submit your site. Yahoo gets more traffic than any other site on the Internet. Yahoo is incredibly picky about your submission. If you do anything wrong, they will reject your submission. Yahoo costs $299/yr for business sites, except for sex sites, which can cost $699/yr. Once you submit, yahoo will review your site and give you an answer within 7 days. If you are denied, you have a month to make changes and re-submit for free. Yahoo doesnt care about your Meta tags or your page content. All they care about is what you write form when you fill out the submission form. Youll only get one chance, so be careful. Some things your site must have before submitting to Yahoo: 1. A complete unique site. Dont give them an "under construction" page or a half finished page with links that dont work. Dont send them a duplicate of another site with a different URL. 2. Commercial sites must list the street address and contact information for the business somewhere on the site. If your address is hard to find on the site, you can direct the Yahoo people to it when they give you the chance to send comments with your submission.
Yahoo CategoriesTo submit your site to Yahoo, you must first find the category your site belongs in. This is very important. If you submit to an incorrect category, youll get nowhere. Yahoo likes you to get specific. That said, top-level higher-level categories rank better, unless you can find a category with your keyword phrase in them. Example: "Camping Gear and Equipment > Tents" would be a good category to submit to if your site was called tents-unlimited.com, even though "Camping Gear and Equipment" is higher. To find your category, try to search for a related site and see what category theyre in. After you find your category, youll click on the "Suggest a Site" link at the bottom of the page.
Commercial sites
Regional Sites
Heed This Warning
Ranking High on Yahoo�. When a user searches by category Yahoo returns results in alphabetical order. "Academy of Web Design SF", wasnt chosen entirely by accident, you know. If you can, youre best off with a site that starts with the letter "A" or a number. Only about 20% of Yahoo users ever search by category, so if you cant think of a good alphabetical name, dont worry about it too much. �. While submitting, you will come to a "Site Information" page, which will ask you for three things, Your URL, your Title, and a short Description. What you type in these three fields determines your keyword density. Youll only get one shot at this, so its very important to be careful. Some web designers print out the Yahoo submission form, fill it out by hand, and wait a night before submitting on the web. Its easier to take your time without a "submit" button glaring up at you. 1. URL: You must submit your URL. Hopefully it contains your most sought after
keywords. Note that Yahoo can only detect keywords in your domain if theyre
separated by dashes. For example: As far as Yahoo is concerned,
Web-Design-School.com is much better than WebDesignSchool.com. 2. Site Title: Usually the site title is the same or very close to your URL. Keyword Density, baby! 3. Description: A short, no nonsense description of your services. Yahoo reviewers love to hack
and slash descriptions, so make it as short and concise as possible. Although
Yahoo doesnt want you to, you want to work the same keywords from your URL and
Title into the description. This can often be achieved by making sure the site
offers a Unique Selling Point (USP) that compels the use of your target
keyword. Example: Listing with the Open Directory Project www.dmoz.org (free)
The Open Directory Project is an indexed database that allows itself to be searched by other search engines. It is gaining extensive use and widespread recognition. The Open Directory Project is staffed by volunteers and is currently the number-two queried search tool. Its used extensively by AOL, Netscape Search, and Lycos. The Open Directory Project is gaining on Yahoo, and therefore a must for submission.
Example:
Your Client Sells Party Tents �. You can submit to more than one category if you like, but when submitting to more than one sublevel of the same category, you should be careful to avoid the appearance of spamming. It is often a good idea to email and ask the editor for advice before you proceed. You can find the editors email by clicking on the editors link at the page bottom. �. You can submit multiple pages from your site as long as each provides some unique value. Example: A page describing how to set up party tents would be acceptable, where as a price list would not.
Listing with Google www.google.com (free)
�. Use the following address to send Goggles spider to your homepage. http://www.google.com/addurl.html �. Google places almost no importance on meta-tags, but instead builds keyword density by searching the whole page for search terms. �. Google places heavy weight on inbound link analysis. Even links from your own site count. �. Google builds its displayed description from words that surround the first instance of the search term in your page. o You can effectively write a description by crafting your most sought after keyword into the first HTML sentence on the page or by making the first thing in your page an image and writing a keyword rich description in the ALT tag. �. Search terms that appear in bold, header, and large text all help marginally to boost rankings �. Paid ads are available on a pay-per-impression basis, and appear at the page top, marked "Sponsored Listings." The fee is $8-$15 per thousand impressions, depending on the desired keyword. You can purchase premium ads for a minimum of $10,000 spent over three months. Premium ads appear inside an outlined box in the upper right of a results page. �. ALT tags play an important roll in Google listings. Make sure you have them and maximize them for keywords. Google listing usually takes about 1 month. Google will automatically re-spider your site every month.
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