. Facts of the week: How to get your web site into Yahoo
Why should your web site have good rankings on Yahoo?

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, one of the leading Internet and digital media audience information and analysis services, Yahoo is the search engine with the second biggest audience reach:

Audience reach is the percentage of US home and work Internet users estimated to have searched on each site at least once during the month through a web browser or some other "online" means. Many people use Yahoo to find web sites on the Internet. A good position on Yahoo can bring you a considerable number of visitors. If your web site doesn't have good rankings on Yahoo, you're missing a lot of potential customers.

How do I get my web site into Yahoo?

Although Yahoo offers a paid inclusion program, it's not necessary to use that program to get into Yahoo. Yahoo finds most web sites through links on other web sites.

If many other web sites link to your site, Yahoo's spider will find your site. In addition, Yahoo also offers a free site submission feature. When Yahoo's spider visits your web pages, you should make sure that your web pages are optimized for Yahoo's ranking algorithm.

How does Yahoo rank web pages?

The official Yahoo statement reads as follows: "Yahoo! Search ranks results according to their relevance to a particular query by analyzing the web page text, title and description accuracy as well as its source, associated links, and other unique document characteristics."

You can get a much more detailed picture of Yahoo's ranking algorithm by analyzing the top ranked web pages on Yahoo for your web site.

How can I optimize my web pages for Yahoo?

There are four points that are important for high rankings on Yahoo:

Don't use frames on your web site. Yahoo's spider cannot follow frameset links:

"Yahoo! Slurp follows HREF links. It does not follow SRC links. This means that Yahoo! Slurp does not retrieve or index individual frames referred to by SRC links."

Make sure that all of your web pages are linked so that Yahoo's spider can find all pages of your web site.

Make sure that your web pages are optimized for Yahoo. Your web pages will only get good Yahoo rankings if Yahoo's spider can find something useful on them. If your web pages aren't search engine ready, you won't get good rankings.

Get links from other web sites. If many web pages are optimized for the same search terms, web sites with good incoming links will get better rankings. In addition, links from other web sites help Yahoo to find your site.