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

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com/webmaster-forums/. Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics.

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