How To Get Listed Prominently on the New Yahoo!

It all started with a gasp. While reviewing the traffic report for one of our sites I noticed that traffic was down significantly from the day before. I soon discovered that the change had occurred at Yahoo.

So I navigated to Yahoo, typed in the keyword, and gasped. The trusty Yahoo search ranking page we had come to know and love (because our site was ranked #1) was gone! It had been replaced by what appeared to be a normal, non-categorized search listing like you would find at most other search engines. And more importantly, our site was no longer on top of that list!

By now you probably know that Yahoo has changed the way that it delivers search results. The old way, of showing a page of categories (Business and Economy > Business to Business > Construction > Metals) in response to a search has been replaced. Visitors now see a few one-line category links followed by a list of sites that rank well against that search term.

Keys To Ranking High on the New Yahoo!:

It's fairly clear that Yahoo will be utilizing several factors in their equation to determine what comes up first in their ranking. Keep these in mind as you register new sites:

1. Presence in their database. They won't list you if you're not there! So if you haven't done it yet, get off your duff, dust off your credit card, and fork over the $299 to get your site listed. You can't afford not to, period!

2. Presence of the keyword in your URL, Yahoo title and Yahoo description. Yahoo still doesn't appear to be ranking their search results based on the page content of your site itself, but rather by the information in the title, description and URL that is listed in their database for your site. Your site must provide valuable information to be accepted into the Yahoo directory, but when it comes to determining who gets ranked first on any given search, it's the words in the titles, descriptions and URLs that determine the ranking order, not the actual copy on your site.

Ideally, the keyword that people will most likely find you under will be listed in your URL, your company name (which Yahoo will use for the title of your site in their listing) and right at the beginning of your site's description on their database. For example:

will score considerably better for a search on "compost makers" than would http:gardenstuff.com Bob's Hardware Store Compost makers, tools, and equipment for making your garden healthy

3. Primacy of the keyword in your URL, Yahoo title and Yahoo description. Yahoo places more weight on words at the beginning of terms than that same word later on in your description. So:
Compost makers, tools, and equipment for making your garden healthy

will score better than: Garden tools, including compost makers, rakes, shovels and more for the term "compost makers."

4. Other factors. Every search engine applies certain weights to certain site criteria and change those weightings frequently. At the moment, Yahoo is doing that in several areas, which may change:

A. Giving more weight to hyphenated URL's than non-hyphenated URL's with the same keywords. Thus (everything else being equal) http://compost-makers.com would score better than http://compostmakers.com. This is especially true if the keyword is not the first element in the URL: http://best-compost-makers.com would score better than http://bestcompostmakers.com.

B. Penalizing sites that have numbers or early-in-the-alphabet letters before the keyword (probably in reaction to those who tried to beat their old alphanumeric ranking system): http://1compostmakers.com probably won't even show up in the first several pages of their listing.

C. Not differentiating between .com's, .net's, .org's, etc. This opens up opportunities to achieve top rankings through purchasing alternative domains to the .com standby. (Caution we have no idea how the new .info, .biz etc. domains will fare in Yahoo's new structure, so approach these with caution).

One area of concern still remains open - there are several thousand sites that are paying extra to be listed at the top of the category pages as sponsored sites. Yahoo has now significantly decreased the value given to those paying partners by shunting as much as 75% of their search traffic off of the category pages and into their search pages. Yahoo stands to lose millions of dollars in sponsorship revenues in the next few weeks if they don't quickly find a way to bring those sponsored links onto the search results pages in addition to their category pages.

All of these changes are vital for internet marketers to understand. Not only will they most likely result in additional traffic to Yahoo, but for those who understand these changes it can yield major benefits of extra traffic, sales and profits!

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Don Crowther is the founder of NetMarketingMasters.com a company dedicated to helping companies build their sales and profits through the techniques used by the masters of Internet marketing. For more information on NetMarketingMasters or to subscribe to their free online marketing newsletter, visit http://NetMarketingMasters.com *************************************************