Part III - Getting Your Site Indexed in Yahoo

Unlike Google, which allows you to use sitemaps as a way to get your site indexed and spidered, Yahoo uses several different approaches to indexing content.

It can take a little while to get indexed, but if you are persistent, you'll see your site indexed on Yahoo in no time.

First, you need to understand the different ways that Yahoo indexes content because there are both free and paid versions.

However, since Yahoo no longer uses Google for its backend results, and Yahoo Directory listings are now mixed with search results, paying $299 a year to get included in the directory may not be the way you want to go.

Of course, if you have a personal, instead of a commercial website, you can get included in the Yahoo Directory for free. This will take some time; however, it is well worth the effort.

Now, before you submit your site to Yahoo, you will need to make sure that it is properly prepared, and that you have a Yahoo account. You can sign up for free.

The easiest way, of course, to get indexed is to have an RSS feed that has been correctly formatted in XML. Then all you have to do is log into your Yahoo account, add it to your My Yahoo page, and your site will begin to get indexed almost immediately. This works especially well for blogs, as well as sites that are updated frequently.

If this isn't a viable option for you, then you can submit the traditional way.

You will need to log into your Yahoo account to get started (it's free), and then you can visit the submission page:

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

There are two ways to submit your site: you can submit your site feed, or you can submit your main url for your website. When you use this form, you will be submitting your site directly to the crawler, which is free.

This is no guarantee that you site will be accepted. If you don't get indexed the first time, add more content to your site, as well as optimize it, and resubmit.

The real secret to doing well on the search engines is to offer real value to your site visitors. Offer real value to your site visitors, and you won't have any trouble getting indexed in the search engines.

There are also other ways to get indexed by Yahoo depending on the type of content you offer and how newsworthy your site is. Google also offers several other paid ways to get indexed like Product Search, as well as travel and sponsored search.

To see a complete list, start here: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

Although Yahoo isn't the largest, or the highest ranking search engine on the internet, it is still one of the most important, and if you want use search engine optimization and promotion as a main technique in your marketing arsenal, you definitely need to get listed here.