Although you do not "optimize" a Web site for a directory submission, per se, there are steps you should take in preparing your submission to Yahoo!. Typically, most people who submit to Yahoo! simply pick a category or two, write a site title and description, and then submit. Even most "guides" on SEP make a big deal about how important it is to submit to Yahoo! and how critical a good Yahoo! position is to a Web site's success, but then simply instruct the reader on how to properly fill out Yahoo!'s submission forms. This is not the strategic approach. Take six steps back and do some serious planning before your even consider selecting your first Yahoo! category. At this point, you don't even know how to pick a Yahoo! category yet. More importantly, by which criteria should you evaluate the value of a particular Yahoo! category versus another?



Before you pick a single Yahoo! category, before you even think about writing a site title and description, you must devise a strategy and you must test, test, and test that plan. If you want to succeed in Yahoo!, you must first determine how you would rank if Yahoo! were to accept your submission exactly as you submitted it to the categories you selected.

What You Should Know

Site descriptions that are more appealing are more likely to have higher click-through rates, and attain and sustain higher rankings. A long laundry list of keywords is unlikely to be appealing to a searcher and is therefore not likely to cause someone to click-through to your listing.

Shorter, more focused keyword-centric site title and description may generate a higher click-through rate and thereby a higher ranking. This is not to say that you should eliminate one of your targeted keyword phrase when preparing your Yahoo! submission. In most cases, having all of your targeted keyword phrases next to each other, early in the description's sentence and in the site title, offers you the best chance of having your site pop up in the top listings beneath your category heading.

A Yahoo! listing that does not contain any of the words that make up a targeted keyword phrase will not create a ranking for that keyword phrase.

If you submit to Yahoo! categories that contain few total listings, your site is much more likely to attain a first-page listing if it does not include all of the keywords that make up a targeted phrase as opposed to completing with 10 to 15 sites containing all of the keywords that make up a particular phrase.

The best Web sites have high-quality content, intuitive design, and information relevant to a particular keyword search are likely to fare well

In some instances, if you are a well-know company but you do not submit anything to Yahoo!, they will find descriptions of your company and use what they find. So keep an eye on how you describe yourself in various places, and be sure it's consistent with what you plan to submit to Yahoo!

When your Web site is finally added to Yahoo!, celebrate! You've joined an elite fraternity of Web sites that have passed the Yahoo! initiation rite. Your Web site will be listed as "New" for a few days and be listed ahead of the alphabetically sorted listings with that category for a period of time.