Getting listed on Yahoo should be without doubt one of the most important missions on any Internet marketers mind.
Yahoo is the biggest of all the search engines, well actually that's not true, you see Yahoo is not technically a search ENGINE it is a human compiled directory of websites that does not have a spiderbot going to sites and indexing them. However for the sake of this article when I say search engines I am referring to all 'search sites'.
Did you know that recent estimates show that Yahoo is currently capturing an amazing 40% of all search engine traffic online? Do you know what this means? It means that almost 1 out of every 2 people that do searches on the Internet use Yahoo, everyone on the Internet has done searches some time or another.
Nothing in the world should be clearer to anyone with a website whose just after reading the above figures. You need your site listed in Yahoo. ASAP.
To recap if your site is not listed in the Yahoo index you're losing lots of potential customers to competitors that are listed in Yahoo. With the amount of visitors Yahoo can send you even with an average listing this could amount to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars worth of lost profit. Lost profit is never good in business. A point to note here is that being listed under webpages does not mean you're listed in Yahoo, it in fact means you're listed with Google because Yahoo gets webpage results from Google.
You now know how important it is to be listed in Yahoo. Let's move on to the good stuff, the main body of this Yahoo submitting tips article - how to submit to Yahoo.
First you've to determine the scope of your site. Is your site commercial or noncommercial? Commercial sites that want to be listed by Yahoo now must use "Business Express" when submitting. This service previously cost a once off figure of $199, however the price has since risen to $299 a year.
"Business Express" what is it? Good question and one that many people ask, well it's basically the same as free submit except that with business express your site is guaranteed to be reviewed within a week's time. Please be aware however that it does not guarantee that your site will be accepted and added to the Yahoo index, it simply guarantee's a timely review of your application.
If your site is rejected Yahoo will allow you to appeal for free within a certain time scale (usually 30 days) of being informed of your rejection. Yahoo staff usually include in your rejection the reasons you have been rejected. You should examine these reasons and fix any problems then resubmit after a week or so.
If your site is a noncommercial entity, you'll still be able to submit for free, but a review could take as long as 8 weeks or might never happen at all.
Before you submit make sure your site is 100% ready, under construction pages need not apply to Yahoo because they're not going to get in. Your site should be aesthetically pleasing to the reviewer, be quick loading and of course should have lots of good content.
Continue to Yahoo submitting tips - part 2