Yahoo Listing Tips

[SiteTutor]

OK lets get started. How does Yahoo return results? Well search results on Yahoo are determined by words that appear within these four areas:

1) category,
2) title,
3) description, and
4) URL. These sites are then sorted by relevance using an automated algorithm.

First up 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, for example visit www.yahoo.com and you will see the results for a search done 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 its in.

You should remember this when submitting to your category, when 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. But which of these categories do you submit to?

[SiteTutor]

THIS IS PART TWO
BE SURE TO READ ALL PARTS
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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 (I'll tell you why in a bit)) 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 Yahoo.com 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. Note - if you are a regional operation try to pick a category with the name of your state or province in it. This will help you get targeted visitors from Yahoo.

[SiteTutor]

THIS IS PART THREE
BE SURE TO READ ALL PREVIOUS POST'S ON THIS THREAD.
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Basically what I'm saying here is that if the title you are 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 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 wont even look twice at your application. You should take this into account when choosing a domain name/official website name.