Submit Your Site To Yahoo!
        By Lisa S. Lawless, Ph.D., C.E.O.

The first thing that you should know is that Yahoo! is not a search engine, it is a directory. Unlike search engines such as AltaVista and HotBot who use computer programs called "spiders" to review your site, Yahoo! uses an actual human editor to evaluate your site.

If you can get your site listed on Yahoo! It can be perhaps the most important step in promoting your web site promotion. Because Yahoo! is currently the number one search directory on the web, a good listing in Yahoo! can bring in more traffic to your site than all the search engines combined.

Before you begin to submit your site for review it is imperative that you start by reading Yahoo's instructions thoroughly. Make sure to also read their Help Index and their How To pages. Yahoo! is very rigid in that they will require that you follow every one of their guidelines to even be considered. Don't make the mistake of jumping the gun on this task!

Let me begin, by reviewing the steps you will need to do to get your site ready to go. The rumors are true. If your site belongs in either the regional or commercial category you now have to pay to submit your site for consideration-

Regional Category

Determine whether your site is regionally specific. If your site is applicable to a specific geographic region, then you should submit your site to the appropriate Regional Category in Yahoo!. However, if your site is not specific to a particular region, then your site should be listed in one of the main Yahoo! categories.

Commercial Category

If your site is commercial in nature (i.e. if it sells a product or service) and is not regionally specific, it belongs somewhere under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business to Business categories. If your site is targeted towards individual consumers, then your site needs to be under the Shopping and Services category. If your site is targeted towards other businesses, it needs to be in the Business-to-Business category.

Regional & Commercial Categories

If your site is both commercial in nature and regionally specific, your site needs to be under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business-to-Business category of the relevant regional category. Submissions to the Regional categories are generally accepted faster and often, when you submit to a Regional category, you can get listed in the main Yahoo! directory as well.

Yahoo! has fees for submission

Yahoo! no longer offers a free submission option for regional and commercial sites and you will have to pay them $299 for the Business Express submission option annually. For more information on this, go to their How to Suggest a Business Express Site page. Read the instructions and terms and conditions of the Business Express submission in order to ensure that your site is eligible.

Paying them $299 does not guarantee you a listing and your site is not given any preference in its rankings. Using the Business Express option merely guarantees that your site will be reviewed within 7 days and that, in case it is not accepted, you will be told why your site was not accepted, and you will be able to appeal this decision, which I cover later in this article.

If your site does not belong to these two categories, you can either submit your site for free, or you can use the Business Express submission option. I recommend that you first try to get your site listed for free. Use the Business Express option as a last resort.

Get started

Get your site in perfect order: You must make sure that your entire site is in perfect shape and that there are no missing graphics, nonexistent pages, "construction." You should also go through each page to ensure that there are no typos or grammatical errors. Your site should be easy to navigate, should look professional and load quickly. If you feel you may require a professional web designer to help you make sure that everything is as it should be, I am open to working on your site or simply consulting with you to review any changes that will need to be made.

Affiliate sites are more difficult to get accepted on Yahoo!

Yahoo! requires that your site provide unique content, and their definition of unique content is very strict. If your site simply consists of a one page sales letter, or, if it only contains links to various affiliate programs, you will find it difficult to get listed.

Provide unique content and/or resources and articles

If you want your site to get listed, you need to provide unique products or you need to provide articles, tips etc. related to your business. If your site does not currently provide articles or tips, them to your site before you submit your site to Yahoo!.

Get a domain name

You need to get a domain name if you are serious about making your business successful on the Internet. Potential customers will notice if you do not, and it makes a difference in how a potential customer will view you. You don't want to be viewed as a fly-by-night company that may not even be there tomorrow. Many web sites offer products and never deliver. Potential customers are wary about whom to trust on the web and having a domain name shows a step in the right direction of gaining their trust. Getting into Yahoo! is hard enough and not having your own domain will make it that much harder.

Provide contact information on your web site

If have a commercial site (i.e. it sells something), you need to provide 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. This should be the actual physical address of your business - not a Post Office Box address. Mentioning the physical address of your business is something you should be doing anyway as it boosts the credibility of your business and that invariably improves sales. You should also mention a phone number and fax number (if you have one), and don't forget about your e-mail address.

How Yahoo! searches work

There are five sections in the Yahoo! search results - Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, Related News and Events. When someone searches for a keyword in Yahoo!, it first if there are any categories which contain all the individual words of the keyword phrase entered. It then displays the web sites in the Yahoo! index, which match the keyword. Finally, in the Web Pages section, it displays sites from Google. Are you already listed in Yahoo!? You will need to find out whether your site is already listed in Yahoo!. To do this, type in the domain name of your site in Yahoo!'s search box, and see whether your site comes up in the Web Sites section. Note that for your site to be listed in Yahoo!, it has to come up in the Web Sites section. If it is listed in the Web Pages section but not in the Web Sites section, it means that your site is listed in Google, not Yahoo!.

How to rank high in the "Most Popular" sections of Yahoo!

Your click popularity is the most important factor, which influences the ranking of a site in Yahoo!. The concept of click popularity was first introduced by the Direct Hit search engine. It is unique in that it tries to find out which sites satisfied the user's needs. It does this by keeping track of two things: which sites the user clicked on among the sites displayed in the results and how much time the user spent in those sites. The logic behind this is that if a user clicked on your site and spent a lot of time in there it assumes that your site must have satisfied the user's needs and hence, must be relevant to that particular keyword. In this situation, your site's click popularity for that keyword improves and so does its ranking for that keyword. However, if a user returned to Yahoo! soon after going your site; Yahoo! then thinks that your site must not be providing relevant information for that particular keyword. In this case, the your site's click popularity for that keyword declines and so does it's ranking for that keyword. When you first get your site listed in Yahoo!, since Yahoo! does not have any data on the click popularity of your site, it will be listed right at the bottom of the search results.

Because Yahoo! keeps track of the I.P. address (i.e. the unique address which identifies a computer on the Internet) of its visitors. It ignores repeated clicks on the same site from the same I.P. address, so don't please don't waste your time doing something like this.

There are only two ways of improving the click popularity of your site - The description of your site in Yahoo! needs to be attractive and you need to build an excellent web site with great content which satisfies your visitor's needs so that they stay longer in your site; and the presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword in the title and description.

If you want to rank highly for a keyword, the title and the Description that you use to submit your site to Yahoo! should contain the keyword. Note that this title is not the title that you have used in the home page of your web site and that this description is not the description that you have used in the Meta Description tag of your home page. Rather, it is the title and the description that you use when you submit your site to Yahoo!. An important point to note here is that Yahoo! searches for strings rather than words.

This means that if one of the individual words of the keyword is embedded inside another word, this will still boost your rankings. For instance, if the keywords applicable for your site contain the word God, but the description of your site in Yahoo! contains the word Goddess, the fact that the string God is present inside the word Goddess will be taken into consideration when your site is ranked.

Writing your title

The title is important not only because the presence of a keyword in the title helps to boost the ranking of your site, but also because sites in the various categories in Yahoo! are listed alphabetically according to the title. However, Yahoo! insists that the title should always be the official name of your company. Hence, short of changing the name of your company, there is not much you can do about the title.

Writing your description

When you write the description, your aim should be to make the Yahoo! editor's job as easy as possible. You should not give the editor the feeling that he/she needs to edit your description in any way. The moment an editor starts to edit your description, you risk having your keywords removed from your description or worse, having it changed in a way, which does not reflect the content of your site. Your description should be a single sentence, which conveys what your site is all about and contains the two keywords you are targeting as close as possible to the beginning of the description. However, your description should not just be a list of keywords - the description that you use should be a proper sentence and should be grammatically correct. It should also be attractive to your visitors so that they actually click on it, which will improve the click popularity of your site, and hence its ranking in Yahoo!.

Rules that you should remember when forming the description: Make sure that the description can tell a visitor what your site is all about. Things like "Have a look at our site" or "Welcome to my site" does not tell a visitor what your site does. Avoid hype of any sort. Avoid using ALL CAPS or exclamation marks. Phrases like "The best web site dealing with widgets!!!!" or "Offers the BEST QUALITY, CHEAPEST xxxx you can find anywhere" are inappropriate.

Don't capitalize any word in your description - not even the first word. For some reason, Yahoo! prefers that the first word of your description is not capitalized. If you look at the sites in any Yahoo! category, you will find that almost none of them have the first word capitalized. Of course, if some of the words in the description are proper nouns, then you should capitalize them.

Write the description in the third person. Don't say "We offer financial planning and credit counseling services", say "offers financial planning and credit counseling services." Don't make your description too long - limit yourself to 10 words at the most. If you are lucky, you may be able to get accepted with a description longer than 10 words. However, longer the description, higher the probability that the editor will want to edit it.

Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes. End your description with a period. If the editor has to add the period to the end of your description, he may also end up editing the description, which is not what you want. Your aim is to have the editor accept the exact description that you had written in order to ensure that your keywords are not removed from the description.

Yahoo! application form

Yahoo! asks you whether there is any other category in which your site should be listed apart from the category to which you are submitting. If you have been able to locate more than one category that is applicable for your site, mention the URL of the secondary category in this field. Yahoo! also asks you for some comments regarding your submission. If you have a unique product or service that not many other web sites listed in Yahoo! are offering, mention this here. Or, if you provide lots of articles and tips related to your business, mention this here. You can also use this to point Yahoo! to the testimonials that you have received. The comments should be made using less than 200 characters.

Also note that Yahoo! asks for your physical address, phone number, fax number, e-mail address etc. These should be the same as the particulars listed in your site. Once you have noted down the answers to all the questions that Yahoo! is going to ask you, double check everything present in the text file to ensure that there are no mistakes and that all the URLs (i.e. the URLs of the categories as well as the URL of your site) are working correctly.

It is very difficult to change your site's listing in Yahoo! once you get listed, and hence, you need to ensure that you do everything correctly the first time. Then, offer a prayer to the God~Goddess and go to the URL of the primary category for your site, click on the Suggest a Site link listed at the bottom and submit your site. Make sure that you follow all the instructions that are mentioned here to the absolute letter.

What to do if your Business Express submission is rejected

The most common reason for Yahoo! rejecting a site when it has used the Business Express submission option is lack of original content. If you get a message from Yahoo! that your site was rejected because of a lack of unique content, you need to add more articles, tips etc. related to your site. This needs to be done within 30 days from the time that you get the rejection note from Yahoo!. Once you have added the articles, send a polite reply to Yahoo! thanking them for their constructive feedback. Point out the fact that after receiving the feedback, you have added the articles and tips.

Be specific here - tell them the exact URLs, which contain these articles. Then request them to review your site again and add it, if they find it appropriate. Another reason that they may say that your site lacks original content is that you already have another site listed in Yahoo! and are trying to get a new site listed. If the two sites have essentially the same content, then you will definitely be rejected. However, even if the two sites have substantially different content, you may still be rejected. What you can try doing in this case is to remove all links from the new site to the old (and vice versa) and ensuring that the design of the new site is also completely different from the old and that no part of the content of the old site is present in the new site.

Another common reason for the rejection of sites is that in Yahoo!'s opinion, the site is still under construction. If you are convinced that your site does not contain missing graphics, links leading to empty or nonexistent pages, "Under construction" symbols etc., then a common reason for Yahoo! saying that the site is under construction is that the site cannot be properly viewed under Netscape.

Yahoo! editors generally use Netscape and hence, it is vitally important that your site be accessible using Netscape. You need to ensure that your site can be viewed properly in Netscape v3.0 and above. In order to see how your site looks under different browsers, go to anybrowser.com. Once you have ensured that your site is accessible under Netscape, send a polite reply to their rejection note thanking them for their constructive feedback and then stating that the site no longer contains any elements under construction. Then request them to review your site again and add it, if they find it appropriate.

How to change your site's listing in Yahoo!

You should only think about trying to change your listing if-

a) The URL of your site has changed
b) The name of your company has changed
    (and hence the Title of your listing should change)
c) Yahoo! has accidentally listed your site without a Description
d) The Description contains a typo.
e) Yahoo! has placed you in a totally inappropriate category
f) The nature of your site has changed and the current description does not reflect the new nature of your site.

The URL for changing your site's listing is http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change. Read the instructions thoroughly before submitting your change request. In the last text box, provide solid reasons as to why your site's listing should be changed.

If you can't get your site's listing changed within 1 month from the time that you have submitted your request, try submitting your request again. If you still can't get your listing changed within 1 month from the second request, follow the procedures outlined in the section on what to do if your site can't get into Yahoo! using the free submission. However, don't submit a change request using the Business Express submission as Yahoo! specifically forbids that.

Yahoo! You get accepted!

Once you have got your site into Yahoo! (they will send you an e-mail if you are accepted), your site will be added to Yahoo!'s What's New section. Furthermore, your site will be marked as new and will be placed at the top of the category (or categories) for 1 week from the time that your site is first listed.

This placement at the top of the category can bring in quite a few visitors to your site every day. After the first week, the position of your site in the categories will be according to the alphabetical ranking of your Title. This will generally be accompanied by a decrease in the number of visitors to your site from Yahoo!. Initially, because Yahoo! lacks any click popularity data on your site, it will be placed at the bottom of the results when someone searches for the keywords applicable for your site. However, with time, your site should start moving up leading to an increase in traffic to your site.

Good Luck!