Welcome to your first of the 4 part mini course. today we are going to talk about the 10 most common mistakes to search engine optimization. When it comes to search engine optimization, there are certain common mistakes that I see people making over and over again. Here's a list of the 10 most common mistakes that I see people making. By avoiding these mistakes, you can avoid a lot of anguish and frustration in the long run. 1) Optimizing your site for the wrong keywords The first step in any search engine optimization campaign is to choose the keywords for which you should optimize your site. If you initially choose the wrong keywords, all the time and effort that you devote in trying to get your site a high ranking will go down the drain. If you choose keywords which no one search for, or if you choose keywords which won't bring in targeted traffic to your site, what good will the top rankings do? 2) Putting too many keywords in the Meta Keywords tag I often see sites which have hundreds of keywords listed in the Meta Keywords tag, in the hope that by listing the keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, they will be able to get a high ranking for those keywords. Nothing could be further from the truth. Contrary to popular opinion, the Meta Keywords tag has almost completely lost its importance as far as search engine positioning is concerned. Hence, just by listing keywords in the Meta Keywords tag, you will never be able to get a high ranking. To get a high ranking for those keywords, you need to put the keywords in the actual body content of your site. 3) Repeating the same keyword too many times Another common mistake that people make is to endlessly repeat their target keywords in the body of their pages and in their Meta Keywords tags. Because so many people have used this tactic in the past (and continue to use it), the search engines keep a sharp lookout for this, and may penalize a site which repeats keywords in this fashion. Sure, you do need to repeat the keywords a number of times. But, the way you place the keywords in your pages needs to make grammatical sense. Simply repeating the keywords endlessly no longer works. Furthermore, a particular keyword should ideally not be present more than thrice in your Meta Keywords tag. 4) Creating lots of similar doorway pages Another myth prevalent among people is that since the algorithm of each search engine is different, they need to create different pages for different search engines. While this is great in theory, it is counter-productive in practice. If you use this tactic, you will soon end up with hundreds of pages, which can quickly become an administrative nightmare. Also, just imagine the amount of time you will need to spend constantly updating the pages in response to the changes that the search engines make to their algorithms. Furthermore, although the pages are meant for different engines, they will actually end up being pretty similar to each other. The search engines are often able to detect when a site has created such similar pages, and may penalize or even ban this site from their index. Hence, instead of creating different pages for different search engines, create one page which is optimized for one keyword for all the search engines. In order to learn how to create such pages, 5) Using Hidden Text Hidden text is text with the same color as the background color of your page. For example, if the background color of your page is white and you have added some white text to that page, that is considered as hidden text. Many webmasters, in order to get high rankings in the search engines, try to make their pages as keyword rich as possible. However, there is a limit to the number of keywords you can repeat in a page without making it sound odd to your human visitors. Thus, in order to ensure that the human visitors to a page don't perceive the text to be odd, but that the page is still keyword rich, many webmasters add text (containing the keywords) with the same color as the background color. This ensures that while the search engines can see the keywords, the human visitors cannot. The search engines have long since caught up with this technique, and ignore or penalize the pages which contain such text. They may also penalize the entire site if even one of the pages in that site contain such hidden text. However, the problem with this is that the search engines may often end up penalizing sites which did not intend to use hidden text. For instance, suppose you have a page with a white background and a table in that page with a black background. Further suppose that you have added some white text in that table. This text will, in fact, be visible to your human visitors, i.e. this shouldn't be called hidden text. However, the search engines can interpret this to be hidden text because they may often ignore the fact that the background of the table is black. Hence, in order to ensure that your site is not penalized because of this, you should go through all the pages in your site and see whether you have inadvertently made any such mistake. 6) Creating Pages Containing Only Graphics The search engines only understand text - they don't understand graphics. Hence, if your site contains lots of graphics but little text, it is unlikely to get a high ranking in the search engines. For improving your rankings, you need to replace the graphics by keyword rich text for the search engine spiders to feed on. 7) Not using the NOFRAMES tag in case your site uses frames Many search engines don't understand frames. For sites which have used frames, these search engines only consider what is present in the NOFRAMES tag. Yet, many webmasters make the mistake of adding something like this to the NOFRAMES tag: "This site uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them". For the search engines which don't understand frames, this is all the text that they ever get to see in this site, which means that the chances of this site getting a good ranking in these search engines are non-existent. Hence, if your site uses frames, you need to add a lot of keyword rich text to the NOFRAMES tag. 8) Using Page Cloaking Page cloaking is a technique used to deliver different web pages under different circumstances. People generally use page cloaking for two reasons: in order to hide the source code of their search engine optimized pages from their competitors and in order to prevent human visitors from having to see a page which looks good to the search engines but does not necessarily look good to humans. The problem with this is that when a site uses cloaking, it prevents the search engines from being able to spider the same page that their users are going to see. And if the search engines can't do this, they can no longer be confident of providing relevant results to their users. Thus, if a search engine discovers that a site has used cloaking, it will probably ban the site forever from their index. Hence, my advice is that you should not even think about using cloaking in your site. 9) Using Automatic Submission Tools In order to save time, many people use an automatic submission software or service to submit their sites to the major search engines. It is true that submitting your site manually to the search engines takes a lot of time and that an automatic submission tool can help you save a lot of time. However, the search engines don't like automatic submission tools and may ignore your pages if you use them. In my opinion, the major search engines are simply too important for you not to spend the time to submit your site manually to them. In order to speed up the process of submitting your site, you can use our free submission tool which allows you to submit your site manually to all the search engines, without having to go to the "ADD URL" pages of the individual engines. 10) Submitting too many pages per day People often make the mistake of submitting too many pages per day to the search engines. This often results in the search engines simply ignoring many of the pages which have been submitted from that site. Ideally, you should submit no more than 1 page per day to the search engines. While many search engines accept more than 1 page per day from a particular domain, there are some which only accept 1 page per day. Hence, by limiting yourself to a maximum of one page per day, you ensure that you stay within the limits of all the search engines. Link Popularity. Link popularity, the number of sites which are linking to your site, is an increasingly important factor as far as search engine placement is concerned. Other things remaining the same, more the number of links to your site, higher will be its ranking. What is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the types of sites which are linking to you. A link from a site which is related to yours is more valuable than a link from an unrelated site. In this mini course, I explore different methods by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. I start with the methods that you shouldn't bother using, then go on to the moderately effective methods, and then end with the most effective methods you can use to boost the link popularity of your site. 1) Submitting your site to Free For All (FFA) pages A common misconception among many Internet marketers is that while FFA pages may not directly bring in traffic to your site, it will help to improve the link popularity of your site, and will indirectly bring in traffic through the search engines. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most FFA pages can contain only a certain number of links at a time. This means that when you submit your site to a FFA page, your site will be placed at the top of the page. However, as more and more people submit their sites to the FFA page, your site will be pushed down, and finally, when it reaches the bottom of the page, it will be removed. Now, since you can bet that plenty of other people are also submitting their sites to the FFA pages, your site will remain in these pages for only a short span of time. in order to ensure that the search engines see your site if and when they come to spider the FFA page, you will need to ensure that you submit your site to these FFA pages on a regular basis - at least once a week. Even if you used an automatic submission program to do it, can you imagine a worse way to spend your time and/or money? Furthermore, many search engines recognize these pages which only contains links to other sites as FFA pages and may completely ignore them. And while I haven't yet seen any evidence that submitting to the FFA pages will actually penalize your site, there is every possibility that this might happen in the future. when it comes to FFA pages, my advice is simple: don't even think about them. 2) Joining Reciprocal Link Services Some people have recommended that in order to increase the link popularity of your site, you can join some reciprocal link services. The basic idea behind these services is that you add some pages to your site which contain links to other sites which are members of that service, and in exchange, these members will also add pages to their sites which will contain a link to your site. Theoretically, more the members of that service, more your link popularity. However, I have plenty of reservations about using this method to boost the link popularity of your site: A.) Most of these services require that you add a visible graphical or text link from your home page to the pages containing the links. If they require a graphical link, it can completely destroy the general look and feel of your site. Even if they require a text link, how would you feel if a visitor to your site clicked on such a link and found one of your competitors (who is also a member of this service) right at the top of a page? Also, while most of these services disallow adult oriented sites, I have seen situations in which some adult sites have been able to become members. How would you feel if an adult site found its way to the top of one of these pages? B.) Most of these services give the same pages containing the links to each of its members, the pages that you are required to upload to your site are exactly the same as the pages which all the other members of that service are required to upload to their servers. Even the file names of the pages tend to be the same for all the members. Most search engines are now able to detect such duplicate pages in different domains and may either ignore the pages or may even penalize all these domains for spamming. C.) Instead of linking only related sites with each other, most of these services link all the members with each other. This means that lots of unrelated sites will be linking to your site. As I mentioned before, links from unrelated sites are simply not as valuable as links from related sites. I don't recommend that you join any reciprocal link programs. 3) Exchanging links with other webmasters Another way of improving the link popularity of your site is to exchange links with other webmasters who have sites which are related to yours, but are not direct competitors. Here's how you can do it: First, open a database program like Microsoft Access and create a new table containing fields like FirstName, LastName, Email Address, URL etc. Then, make a list of the sites belonging to your competitors. Then, go to AltaVista, and type in the following in the search box: link:somesite.com -url:somesite.com where somesite.com is the domain name of one of your competitors. This will give you a list of all the sites which are linking to that competitor. Then, find out in what context a particular site has linked to your competitor. If this site is an affiliate of your competitor, then your chance of getting a link from this site is limited, unless you offer an even better affiliate program. However, if you find that this site has a Links page which contains links to other sites, one of which is a link to your competitor, then it is an excellent prospect for exchanging links. Find out the name and email address of the webmaster of the site and add them to your database. In this way, go through all the sites which are linking to your competitors, locate those sites which you think may want to exchange links with you, and build up your database. Once you have done that, create a Links page in your site, and add the URLs of these sites to the Links page. Then, send an email to these webmasters, introduce yourself and your site, congratulate them on building an excellent web site, tell them that you have already added a link to their sites from yours, and then ask them whether they would be kind enough to add a link to your site. In your email, emphasize the fact that exchanging links in this way will be mutually beneficial for both of you because it will help both of you drive traffic to your sites. Wait for a month or so to see the response. Some webmasters will agree to link to you. Others will simply not respond. After a month, remove the links to those sites who are not interested in exchanging links and using the methods outlined above, try to locate more sites with which to exchange links. When you send the email to the webmasters, make sure that you personalize each email. Don't begin every email with "Hello Webmaster", begin with "Hello Mike". If you want, you can use email merge programs to automatically personalize each email. You can check out some email merge programs by going to http://download.cnet.com and searching for "email merge" (without the quotes). The main problem with this method of improving the link popularity of your site is that it takes a lot of time. You may find that the number of links you manage to get just does not justify the time that you spend over it. Another thing that you can do is to mention in your Links page that you are willing to exchange links with other web sites. This allows other webmasters who come to your web site to propose a link exchange. 4) Starting an Awards Program A moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to start an awards program. You can have web sites which are related to yours apply for an award from your site. The sites which win the award get the chance to display the logo for your award. This logo is linked to your site, preferably to a page which contains more information on the award. If you publish a newsletter, consider declaring the winners in your newsletter. You can also perform a review of the winners' sites in your newsletter. This adds useful content to your newsletter and also gives more webmasters the incentive to apply for your award, since you may review their sites in your newsletter. This also gives them the incentive to subscribe to your newsletter to see if they win the award. Make sure that you give awards to only those sites which deserve to win. If you give your award to sites which don't deserve it, your award will have little credibility, which will, in turn, hurt the credibility of your company. Furthermore, make sure that the logo you design for the award looks professional. If it doesn't, not many webmasters will want to display it in their sites. 5) Giving testimonials This may sound a bit unusual, but giving testimonials for products or services which you find useful can be another moderately effective way of improving the link popularity of your site. If you really like a product, simply write to the company and tell them why you liked the product so much and how it has helped you. Chances are, the company will write back to you to thank you for your comments and will ask you for permission to display your comments in their web site. Tell the company that you have no problems if they publish your comments, but request them to add a link to your site along with the testimonial. There is every possibility that the company will agree since publishing the URL of your web site gives more credibility to the testimonial. Of course, please don't go about giving testimonials to every company you can locate just because it will improve your link popularity. 6) Posting to Message Boards and Discussion Lists Another moderately effective method of increasing the link popularity of your site is to post to online message boards. At the end of every message that you post, you can sign off by mentioning your name and the URL of your web site. If the message board allows it, you can even include a short promotional blurb about your site at the end of your posts. However, make sure that the individual messages that are posted to that message board are archived in static HTML pages (i.e. the URLs for the individual messages should not contain a "?"). Otherwise, the search engines will consider these pages to be dynamic pages and may not spider these pages and hence, will not be able to find your link. Email based discussion lists which are archived on the web in static HTML pages can also be used to boost the link popularity of your site in a similar manner. In this case, the signature file that you use with your email program should contain the URL for your web site. 7) Setting up new web sites Yet another moderately effective method of improving the link popularity of your site is to set up new web sites and have these new sites link to your main site. If you are Jeff Bezos (CEO of Amazon.com), you can afford to purchase hundreds of new domains and have these new domains link to your main site. If you are not Jeff Bezos, you can simply set up new sites with some of the free web hosts. (Of course, your primary web site should always be hosted in a separate domain of its own). Simply add a few pages of unique content to each of your new sites, and have each of the pages in your new sites link to your main site. If you use this technique, make sure that you do not duplicate content across multiple sites. If you do, the search engines might penalize your sites for spamming. You need to ensure that all the pages that you create for these new sites contain unique content. The disadvantage of this method is that some search engines (like AltaVista) refuse to spider sites which are present in the free web hosts. Still, there are many search engines which will spider these sites, and hence, the link popularity of your main site will improve in these search engines. 8) Starting a Link Contest A good method of improving the link popularity of your site is to give away prizes to other webmasters if they link to you. The prizes that you give out should ideally be something which other webmasters will find valuable enough to want to link to you, but which do not cost you too much. For instance, if you publish a newsletter, and have unsold ad inventory, you can give away some free advertisements in your newsletter to the winners. If you sell a software (or an ebook), you can give away a free copy of your software or ebook to the winners, since it doesn't cost you anything to produce an additional copy of digital goods like software and ebooks. Link contests work best if you run the contest on a continuous basis and if you declare new winners frequently. If you run the contest for a few months, and then stop it, the webmasters who had linked to you will all remove their links. However, if you run it on a continuous basis, and declare new winners every month or so, the webmasters will have the incentive to keep their links to your site. Also, make sure that you require all participants to have a link to your site either in their home page, or in an internal page of their site which is linked to their home page. Also ensure that the page which contains the link is no more than two levels deep from their home page (i.e. it should not take more than two clicks to go from the home page to the page containing the link). If they don't do this, the search engine spiders may not index the page which contains the link to your site, and hence, may not find your link. 9) Writing articles and allowing them to be re-published This is by far one of the best ways of improving the link popularity of your site, and one of my favorites. Whenever I write an article on search engine placement, I first publish it in my newsletter and then I publish the article in my site as a separate web page. I also submit it to the following article submission sites: http://www.ezinearticles.com/add_url.html http://www.ideamarketers.com http://www.marketing-seek.com/articles/submit.shtml http://certificate.net/wwio/ideas.shtml http://www.web-source.net/articlesub.htm Many webmasters and ezine publishers frequent these article directories in search of articles. Submitting my articles to these directories gives them the opportunity of re-publishing my articles. Now, at the end of each article, I mention that people are free to re-publish the article as long as they include my resource box (i.e. my bio) at the end of the article. I always include the URL of my site in the resource box. This means that whenever someone publishes one of my articles in his/her web site, I have another site linking to my site. Also, many ezine publishers archive their ezines in their web sites. If they have re-published my article in a particular issue, I again get a link. Writing articles is also an excellent viral marketing tool. As some webmasters and ezine publishers publish my articles, other webmasters and ezine publishers will read my article. Some of them, in turn, will publish my article, which will again be read by other webmasters and ezine publishers, some of whom will publish it... and so on. Also, since only web sites related to mine would be interested in publishing my articles, all these links tend to come from related sites, which, as I mentioned earlier, are more valuable than links from unrelated sites. Writing articles, of course, has another very important benefit - if you write good articles, it makes you known as an expert in your field. This helps to improve your credibility, which makes people more comfortable about buying your products or services. Some notes about writing articles: i) I have learnt through experience that some webmasters will publish other people's articles and will display the complete resource box but will not link to the URL mentioned in the resource box. In order to prevent this, you need to explicitly state that the article can be published only if the URL mentioned in the resource box is linked to your site. ii) Your resource box should not be too long it should be no more than 6 lines long, formatted at 65 characters per line. Otherwise, other webmasters and ezine publishers will hesitate to publish your article. 10) Starting your own affiliate program This is another excellent way by which you can improve the link popularity of your site. When you have your own affiliate program, you give other webmasters the incentive to link to you. In this case too, since most of these web sites will be related to the industry in which you are operating, these links will be more valuable than links from unrelated sites. Now, when you start your affiliate program, you need to decide whether you want to run the program yourself, or whether you want to outsource it from a third party. While outsourcing your affiliate program has a number of benefits, doing so will not help you improve the link popularity of your site, because affiliates are going to link to the third party's site. In order to improve the link popularity of your site, you need to ensure that the affiliate links are pointing to your domain. 11) Submitting to the directories This is by far the most important step as far as improving the link popularity of your site is concerned. As I mentioned before, what is important is not only the number of links to your site, but also the quality of the links to your site. No links are as important as links from some of the major directories like Yahoo!, the Open Directory etc. Hence, it is vitally important that you get your site registered by these directories. Thank You for taking interest in our 4 part mini course. I hope you will benefit and use these techniques to increase your link popularity. Getting your site an optimum listing in Yahoo! is perhaps the most important step in effective web site promotion. An optimum listing in Yahoo! can bring in more traffic to your site than all the search engines combined. In addition to this, getting listed in Yahoo! will also help you improve the link popularity of your site which helps in improving the ranking of your site in the search engines. In this article, we focus on how you can get your site an optimum listing in Yahoo!. First, you should note that Yahoo! is not a search engine - it is a directory. Unlike the search engines, an actual human editor evaluates your site. Before starting, read Yahoo!'s instructions thoroughly. Read their Help Index at: http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/url and their How To page at: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/ Familiarize yourself with these instructions because they mean every word of what they say. Before you submit your site, go through your entire site and ensure that there are no missing graphics, no links leading to empty or non-existent pages, no "Under construction" symbols and no typos or grammatical errors. Your site should be easy to navigate, should load quickly and should look professional. Furthermore, your site must provide unique content. Yahoo!'s 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 impossible to get listed. For getting listed in Yahoo!, your site needs to have at least a few pages of good content in it Also, your site needs to be in its own domain, especially if it is of a commercial nature. Having your own domain adds more credibility to your site and tells Yahoo! that yours is a serious site which won't be taken down very soon. Getting into Yahoo! is hard enough not having your own domain will make it that much harder. Furthermore, if your site is of a commercial nature (i.e. it is selling something), you need to mention 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. Of course, mentioning the physical address of your business is something you should be doing anyway - it boosts the credibility of your business which improves sales. Along with the physical address, you should also mention a phone number and a fax number (if you have one). Of course, you should always mention an email address. Now, let's analyze how Yahoo! displays its search results. There are 5 sections in the Yahoo! search results - Categories, Web Sites, Web Pages, Related News and Events. For the purpose of this article, we can ignore the Related News and Events sections and concentrate on the Categories, Web Sites and Web Pages sections. When someone searches for a keyword in Yahoo!, it first checks to see whether there are any categories which contain all the individual words of the keyword. If so, it first displays the names of those categories. 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. Your first task is to find out whether your site is already listed in Yahoo!. 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!. If your site is already listed but you are not satisfied with the listing, read the last section of this article on changing your site's listing in Yahoo!. Assuming that your site is not listed, your objective is to get your site a high ranking in the Web Sites section. Here are the factors which influence the ranking of your site in the Web Sites section: i) Presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword somewhere in the name of the category or in the name of a higher level category. ii) Click Popularity: The concept of click popularity means that when a user searches for something in Yahoo!, it tries to find out which sites satisfied the user's needs. It does this by keeping track of two things: a) which sites the user clicked on among the sites displayed in the results and b) how much time the user spent in those sites. The logic behind this is that if a user clicked on a particular site and spent a lot of time in that site, that site must have satisfied the user's needs and hence, must be relevant to that particular keyword. In this case, the site's click popularity for that keyword improves and so does its ranking for that keyword. But, if a user did not go to a particular site, or returned to Yahoo! soon after going to that site, that site must not be providing relevant information for that particular keyword. In this case, the site's click popularity for that keyword declines and so does its ranking for that keyword. Now, 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. A question that arises here is - how a site which is listed right at the bottom of the search results can have many users clicking on it so that its click popularity improves. The answer to this is that when a user clicks on a site which is listed at the bottom, its click popularity improves by a greater extent than when it is listed at the top. This means that it only requires a few users clicking on your site to improve the click popularity of your site when it is listed at the bottom. So, how do you ensure that your site's click popularity is high? Some people have suggested that you can improve the click popularity of your site by regularly searching for the keywords that are applicable for your site, clicking on your site's listing in Yahoo!, and then by not going back to Yahoo!. They have also suggested that you can click on a competitor's listing in Yahoo! and then can immediately click on the browser's Back button to go back to Yahoo!, so that Yahoo! thinks that this site did not satisfy the user's needs and gives it a lower ranking. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only is this method unethical, it is also ineffective. 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. It also uses cookies to track the activities of its visitors. Of course, if you are using a dialup connection to the Internet and your Internet Service Provider assigns you with a dynamic I.P address, you can get around this restriction by disconnecting your computer from the Internet and then again logging in and by deleting the cookies. But, forgetting for a moment the sheer amount of time that you would need to spend doing this, remember that Yahoo! gets millions of visitors every day. How much influence can a single person have in such a situation? 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. iii) 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 of your site's listing in 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 Australia, but the description of your site in Yahoo! contains the word Australian, the fact that the string Australia is present inside the word Australian will be taken into consideration when your site is ranked. iv) Prominence of the keyword in the Title and the Description - "Prominence" means how close the keyword is to the beginning of the Title and Description. Other things remaining the same, closer the keyword to the beginning of the Title and the Description, higher your ranking. v) Presence of the keyword or a part of the keyword in the URL - You will get a slightly higher ranking if the keyword or a part of the keyword is also present in the URL of your site. Now we come to the Title for your site. 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 site. Hence, short of changing the official name of your site, there is not much you can do about the Title. Now we come to how you should write the description of your site. 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!. Broadly, here are the rules that you should remember when forming the description: i) 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. ii) 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 WIDGETS you can find anywhere" are inappropriate. iii) 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. iv) 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.". v) 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. vi) Check your description for typos and grammatical mistakes. vii) End your description with a period. If the editor has to add the period to the end of your description, she 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. Now that you know the description that you should use, it is time to establish the category to which you should submit your site. First of all, you need to 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. Now, 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. 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. With this background, let's see how you can determine the appropriate category for your site. Simply search for the two keywords which you have determined earlier. Go through all the categories which the top ranking sites belong to. Note down the category (or categories) which contain sites which are very similar to yours. In many cases, there will only be one category which contains sites similar to yours. In that case, this is the category to which you should submit your site. If you find that there is more than one category which contains sites similar to yours, and if you are convinced that all these categories are applicable for your site, select the two categories which contain the least number of sites. Your primary category will be the one with the least number of sites. The secondary category will obviously be the other category. Now, create a text file in which you can record the details of your submission. Note down the date when you are submitting, the URL of your web site, the Title and the Description of your site as well as the URLs of the category (or the 2 categories) which are applicable for your site. Now go to the URL of the Primary category for your site, click on the Suggest a Site link at the bottom of the page and follow the instructions there. (If that category does not have a Suggest a Site link, then it means that it is a very general category to which new sites cannot be added.) Instead of submitting your site right away, I recommend that you first use a dummy, non-existent site to know the questions that Yahoo! is going to ask you. Note down the answers to these questions in the text file so that you can paste them later when you are actually submitting your site. Of course, don't actually submit the dummy site by clicking on the final submission button - just use it to get an idea of the questions that Yahoo! will ask you. Of particular importance are two questions. 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 which 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, email 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 Goddess Yahoo! :-), 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. Now, remember that if yours is a commercial site and is not regionally specific, it must be under the Business and Economy > Shopping and Services or Business and Economy > Business to Business categories of the main Yahoo! directory. Yahoo! no longer offers a free submission option for sites under these two categories - you have no choice but to pay them $299 for the Business Express submission option. For more information on this, go to their How to Suggest a Business Express Site page at http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/suggest.html 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. You shall also have a chance of appealing a rejection within 30 days. Of course, all the instructions regarding choosing a proper description and choosing a correct category are still applicable. 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. Once you have finished submitting, don't delete the text file - you will need it later when you want to again submit to Yahoo! (in case you are not accepted the first time). What to do if your site is not accepted This section is intended for those who have used the free submission and have not been listed. In case you have used the paid submission and have been rejected, see the next section. Unless you are very lucky, if you have used the free submission, your site may not be accepted in your first attempt. If your site is not accepted within 1 month from the time that you submitted it, submit it again using the same instructions as above. If your site is still not accepted 1 month after the second submission, some people have suggested that you write to a special Yahoo! address - url-support@yahoo-inc.com. However, in my personal experience, writing to this address has not been effective. Instead, here's what you should do: I have accidentally discovered the email address of an actual editor of Yahoo!. Her name is Rosie Skaw and her email address is rosie@yahoo-inc.com. I am mentioning her email address here with the understanding that no one abuses it. This method works but it is not one of the familiar "back doors to Yahoo!" that one often gets to hear of (believe me, there are no back doors to Yahoo!). This email address should be used only after you have tried to submit your site to Yahoo! at least twice using the steps outlined earlier and have failed. After submitting your site twice, if you still don't manage to get listed, write a very polite email to Rosie. Introduce yourself, tell her that you have been trying to submit your site to Yahoo! and have failed. Give her the details of your last submission - when you submitted it, the URL of your site, the Title and the Description that you used as well as the category (or categories) to which you submitted your site. If you have a unique product or service that not many other web sites listed in Yahoo! are offering, mention it. Or, if you provide lots of articles and tips related to your business, mention that too. You can also point her to the testimonials that you have received. Request her (very politely) to evaluate your site and add it to Yahoo! if she finds your site appropriate. Once you have sent the email to Rosie, wait another month or so to see if you get listed. If you still can't get listed, don't send her any more emails. Yahoo! provides a phone number for listing support. The number is 408-731-3333. Call this number and leave a message mentioning your URL and the date when you last submitted and requesting (again, very politely) that your site be listed. If the phone call does not get you listed, consider writing to Yahoo! at Yahoo! Corporation 3420 Central Expressway, 2nd floor Santa Clara, CA 95051, USA In this case too, mention your URL, the date when you last submitted, the Title and Description that you used and the category to which you submitted. Don't forget to mention the fact that you are selling a unique product or that you provide lots of articles or that you have received glowing testimonials from users. If you still can't get your site listed, and you are convinced that your site deserves to get into Yahoo! and that you have followed all the rules, you should then use the Business Express submission option. What to do if your Business Express submission is rejected A 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, then your site may either be full of affiliate links and nothing else, or it may be a 1 page direct response sales site. In the former case, as I mentioned, your site cannot hope to get listed. In the latter case, you need to divide up your sales message into multiple pages. Consider adding a few articles and tips related to your site. Then, 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 contains 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. In this case, there is no point in appealing the rejection - Yahoo! will definitely reject your site again when you appeal. Instead, what you can try doing is to remove all links from the new site to the old site (and vice-versa) and ensuring that the design of the new site is also completely different from the old site and that no part of the content of the old site is present in the new site (and vice-versa). Then, wait 2-3 months, and again submit the new site to Yahoo! using its Business Express submission. 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 non-existent 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: http://www.anybrowser.com/siteviewer.html 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! If getting your site listed in Yahoo! is tough, changing your site's listing is a Herculean task. Firstly, note that Yahoo! does not care about the ranking of your site. Hence, if you are trying to submit some minor changes to the description with a view of getting a higher ranking, you are unlikely to be successful. You should only think about trying to change your listing if a) the URL of your site has changed, or b) the official name of your site has changed (and hence the Title of your listing should change), or c) Yahoo! has accidentally listed your site without a Description, or d) the Description contains a typo, or e) Yahoo! has placed you in a totally inappropriate category, or 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 Yahoo! specifically forbids that. In Conclusion: Once you have got your site into Yahoo! (they will send you an email 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. Thank You for taking interest in our 4 part mini course. I hope you will benefit and use these techniques to know how to submit your website to Yahoo. Welcome to your fourth of the 4 part mini course. today we are going to talk about Meta Tags- How To Use Them. By now almost everyone has heard of Meta tags. Unfortunately there is a lot of misunderstanding as to what exactly Meta tags do and what they don't do. Far too many people are convinced that all they need to do to get a top search engine ranking is to fill their meta keyword tag with a lot of relevant keywords and like magic, they will get a top ranking. This is far from the reality. First of all, every search engine treats Meta Tags differently, they recognize different tags, the influence they have on your page ranking varies greatly from one search engine to another. The meta keyword tag in particular is not used by many of the major search engines including Google. Yet the myth persists that by simply placing meta tags in your page, you have optimized your web page. WRONG. Just filling your meta keyword tag with what you believe are your primary keywords without understanding the relationship of the meta tags to the rest of the page can actually result in your site getting a LOWER ranking than if you never used meta tags to begin with. There are NO search engines that decide your ranking based solely on your Meta Tags. So stop thinking they are the answer. They are one small part of optimizing your page. Having said that, let's look at some general information on Meta Tags, what they are, what they do and how to use them. remember, this information is not geared to any specific search engine but rather an overview of what these tags do. Meta tags do provide a useful way to control your listing in some search engines, to a point. On pages that lack text, such as an opening splash screen, Meta tags can be helpful. Frames pages can also benefit from Meta tags. However, simply including a Meta tag is not a guarantee that your page will achieve a high ranking in the various search engines. They do have their purpose, but treat them as an aide and not the ultimate answer for achieving high search engine rankings. The most important Meta tags used for search engine optimization are the 'description' and 'keywords' tags. The 'description' tag returns a description of the page for some search engines. Not all search engines will use your Meta description tag, some will take the first lines of text from your page and use that as the summary you see in the search engines. The 'keywords' tag provides the search engine various keywords that will be used to index your page. Putting a keyword in your Meta keywords tag doesn't mean that your page will rank high or even rank at all for those words. As I said earlier, very few search engines factor the meta keyword tag when determining the ranking of your site. Some do index the content of the tag, they know it is there, but it will not help you. What happens to your page if there are no Meta tags present in some search engines? Let's assume you created a page with a title of 'Joe's Home Page' and your first few lines of text on the page says 'Welcome to Joe's Party!' Some search engines will return a listing that says 'Joe's Home Page', as the title and a description of 'Welcome to Joe's Party' Maybe this page has content related to selling supplies for birthday parties. Nothing that the search engine found gives any indication of what your page content deals with. Let's use the Meta tags to let the search engine know more about the specifics of your page. The Meta tags go inside the header tags, so that everything looks like this: META name="description" content="Party supplies, everything you need to know to plan a successful party!."> In search engines that support the 'descriptions' tag, the search engine will return a listing something like, "Joe's Home Page, as the title and a description of 'Party supplies, everything you need to know to plan a successful party! Do you see that the search listing matches what you entered on the description tag? That's exactly what the 'description' tag is supposed to do.Now looking at the above, you can see that the title is still a problem, it does not describe in any way what your business does. You're probably asking, what about the meta keywords tag? Doesn't it help my page to be shown in the search engine if someone types in any of my keywords as part of their search?. If someone enters the word party into a search engine, a few search engines 'may' match one of your keywords in your tag. But don't bet the farm on it. Most of the big search engines simply don't use it, or it carries no more weight than regular text. The placement of your keywords IS very important and the Meta keyword tag can actually have a negative impact on your site's ranking. Here's how. Your keywords MUST appear in other places on your page. If the keyword is not present in the actual text of the page, not present in the title of the page, the search engines will often deem this an irrelevant keyword and drop the ranking of your page. If the keyword doesn't appear somewhere on your page,don't place it in your keyword meta tag. I've seen site after site cram 100 largely irrelevant keywords into the meta keyword tag thinking they have found search engine nirvana, only to end up in the search engine graveyard on page 400 +.... The 'robots' tag is another Meta tag that is being used more and more although not all search engines support it. This tag lets you specify that a certain page should not be indexed by a search engine spider. At the very least, make certain you add Meta description and Meta keyword tags to your web pages. They will definitely help you with some search engines. But be careful how you use them. Make certain what you place in these tags relates to your page and actually appears in your pages content. Choosing the proper keywords is perhaps the single most important factor in optimizing your site. Without the right keywords your chances of search engine traffic are slim. And this is far more involved than simply finding words that you think apply to your business. You must know how many times words are actively being searched, and how many competing pages there for a given keyword. It's kind of pointless to go after a keyword if it has 32 million competing pages. Thank You for taking interest in our 4 part mini course. I hope you will benefit and use these techniques on Meta Tags-How To Use Them. This is the last issue of your 4 part mini course. I sincerely want to Thank You for your loyal patronage to our ezine and to this publication.