.com Not Listed in Regional Yahoo? Don’t Despair!

.com Not Listed in Regional Yahoo? Don’t Despair!

by: Glenn Murray

If you’re a nonAmerican business with a .com web address, and your regional Yahoo ranking is important to you, then my story might interest you.
Recently my copywriting website dropped out of Yahoo’s Australian rankings. For quite a while, it had been at number 1 for my primary keywords ขadvertising copywriterข, ขcopywriterข, and ขwebsite copywriterข. But then it suddenly disappeared. I clicked through about 10 pages of results, and it was nowhere to be seen. I then searched for my domain, and Yahoo couldn’t find it.
Something smelt fishy.
I’d done nothing ‘naughty’ to my site to warrant a ban, and I still had heaps of links to my site (actually, I had more than ever before).
I’m an Australian advertising copywriter. I’m based just north of Sydney and I host my website with a major Australian host. But my web address is a .com, not a .au. I started thinking this might be the problem.
So I emailed Yahoo support, explaining the problem, and sharing my thoughts on the cause.
And all of a sudden, nothing happened.
So I waited. And I waited. And I waited. And finally, after about a couple of weeks, I received an email from a Yahoo support representative informing me – incorrectly – that my keyword wasn’t featured in my page title or description. I should remedy this shortcoming and resubmit my site to Yahoo.
Frustrated, I replied. I repeated the important facts from the first email just to ensure they’d listened. They hadn’t. They hadn’t even searched for my domain to confirm that Yahoo no longer recognised it.
When they got back to me this time, they had started paying a bit more attention. The support rep confirmed my suspicion that Yahoo had excluded my site because of its .com URL. Her very helpful solution was that I should change my domain to .au! She included some ridiculously complex instructions for how to do so, and sent me on my merry way.
As you might expect, I wasn’t satisfied. Nor was I merry. I explained to her that this was not an acceptable solution because all the links to my site on the internet are pointing to the .com and my email address uses the .com.
She was unmoved. She asserted that this was the best and only way to solve the problem. Oh… and it might help if I added my primary keyword to my title and description.
My laughter was not good humoured! I wrote back expressing my displeasure at this ขsolutionข. I painstakingly explained how Yahoo had made a mistake, and that if Google was capable of recognising my Australian business despite its .com addresses, I would think it’s technically possible. I also cited several other .coms in the first couple of pages of Australian results.
No response.
The situation didn’t look promising…
If this sounds like a familiar story to you, don’t despair. A week or two later, I searched Yahoo Australia for my primary keyword, and surprise, surprise… My site was ranked number 1 again!
The moral to the story? Don’t be intimidated by Yahoo. Trust your instincts and don’t give up. If you’re an Australian business with a .com, and you’re not listed in Australian searches, this might be why. In fact, I would think this story is relevant to all regional Yahoos. (Of course, before making any accusations, it’s a good idea to make sure your site is properly optimised and that you have plenty of inbound links.)
Anyway, that’s my story. I hope it helps someone.
And they all lived happily ever after. So far at least…
Yahoooooooo!
The End.

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you include the byline
byline includes a functioning link to http://www.divinewrite.com
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About The Author

Glenn Murray heads advertising copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at [email protected]. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

This article was posted on June 29, 2004

by Glenn Murray

Choosing your MetaKeywords

Choosing your MetaKeywords

by: Alan Cole

Introduction

This article assumes you already know what a ‘metatag keyword’ is and know a little about their importance to search engines. In this article I will attempt to explain the art of choosing the most appropriate and best performing keywords for your web pages.

As you should already know keywords contained within your websites’ meta tags are extremely important in allowing search engines to determine the content of your web pages. In order to make sure that these keywords are bringing your site up within Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) and driving visitors to your site, the most important factors in determining your keywords are:

Relevance.

Choosing keywords that people actually search for.

Choosing keywords without too much competition.

Relevance

All your keywords should ALWAYS be relevant to the content within the page they describe. Adding keywords to your site just because they are commonly searched for words is not recommended. Not only will it frustrate visitors who are looking for other information, but it may well get your site blacklisted from search engine rankings.

Highly relevant keywords will attract visitors who are actually interested in the products and services your website offers. At the end of the day, it is better to attract fewer visitors who actually have an interest in your website than it is to attract more visitors who leave immediately.

Choosing Keywords people search for

Although your keywords should all be relevant, sometimes it is best not to be too specific.

For example, I once discovered a new fossil (honest!), it was new to science so I named it, wrote a paper on it and had it published. I didn’t ever build a web page dedicated to it, but if I had the most used keyword and most relevant word would have been the fossils name (Trypanites fosteryeomani). You might therefore think that it would be sensible to use this as one of my most important keywords… However, that would (at least to start with) have been wrong. No one else has ever heard of this fossil, so it is very unlikely that anyone would ever type its name into a search engine. And sure enough, a quick check shows that during Dec 2004 there wasn’t a single search for this term within a particular, popular search engine.

I would therefore need to be more generic with my choice of keywords. The fossil itself was a trace fossil of a worm from the Jurassic, so keywords/phrases such as ‘fossil’, ‘trace fossil’ or ‘worm trace fossil’ may be more successful.

There are several tools available that allow you to check the number of times a particular word or phrase has been searched for. It is important to choose keywords that are regularly searched for and these tools can help in this decision. It is also worth including common misspellings of your most relevant keywords as your competitors may not have thought of this when choosing their keywords.

Choosing keywords without too much competition

The section above may lead you to believe that choosing very generic keywords is your best bet as they are often searched for. However, if you get too generic in your choice of keywords then you will be competing with many more websites for the top spots in the SERPS. If we go back to our fossil example we can see what I mean. A quick search in Google brings up the following numbers of results:

Trypanites fosteryeomani – 1 result (something I once wrote in a forum!)

Jurassic Worm Trace Fossil – 4,320 results

Trace Fossil – 407,000 results

Fossil – 9,120,000 results

As you would expect, the more generic we get, the more results we get. It can be seen then that choosing the best keywords is a matter of balancing the number of times the keywords are searched for against the number of other sites competing for rankings with those keywords. The best keywords will be those that are searched for often but have few competing sites (assuming the keywords are relevant to your content).

I find that it is best to have a balance between the generic and specific keywords relating to your web page and using keyphrases is a useful way of achieving this. In this way the entire keyphrase can be specific to your particular page, but the individual words within it are fairly generic.

e.g. Affordable Website Design Wales (4 generic keywords to create a specific keyphrase)

To Summarise, choosing keywords is an essential part of producing a successful website. Your keywords need to be highly relevant to the content of your page and specific enough to reduce competition. They also need to contain some generic keywords that are often searched for. As always, the single most important factor is relevancy and good content to go with the keywords.

About The Author

Alan Cole runs Pixelwave Design, a oneperson web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd.

Pixelwave Design specialise in accessible, conformable search engine friendly website.

http://www.pixelwave.co.uk

[email protected]

This article was posted on March 02

by Alan Cole

How To Find The Top Keywords Relating To Your Them

How To Find The Top Keywords Relating To Your Theme

by: Jeff Schuman

Have you ever wondered what people are searching for online? More specifically have you ever wondered what people are searching for as it relates to the theme of your website?

Letกs say you have a website built around the theme of music downloads. Here are 2 easy ways to get a list of keywords you can use to build your home page and then build more pages around each specific word.

1. Do a search by typing in music downloads here:

http://www.pixelfast.com/overture

As of November 2004 the keyword phraseก music downloads was searched 1,068,310 times. We can also see that กfree music downloadsก was searched 1,169,992 times.

As you look down the list you will find all kinds of combinations of keyword phrases with the words กmusic downloadsก included in them.

You can build specifc web pages centered around each keyword phrase. You will find that lesser searched keywords have less competition and therefore will be easier for you to make it to the top of a search engine and generate free traffic.

For example the keyword phrase ก free mp3 music downloadก was searched 22,360 times. This would be a great keyword phrase to target in comparison to the more generic phrase กmusic downloads.ก

2. Take a look at what people are willing to pay for a keyword here:

http://www.teamschuman.com/7searchkeywordtool

When typing in กmusic downloadก it brings up the keyword, number of searches, and the top 5 bids. It also brings up a complete list of possible keyword phrases and what people are paying for them. You can use this information to find affiliate products relating to each specific keyword phrase and then build additional web pages relating to each specific one. You can add these keywords to your home page and then join 7Search as an affiliate and add pay per click text to your pages.

Then get paid by 7Search when someone clicks on an ad relating to that keyword. I do this to generate hundreds and thousands of dollars each month. It is a great way to make some money on your site for generating traffic to it. Here are examples on 2 of my websites. You will see the text ads for the Top 10 websites at the top of each page.

http://www.teamschuman.com

http://www.sitesplus.com

If you are looking for top keywords being searched in a broad range of categories then subscribe to the กKeyword Reportก here:

http://www.teamschuman.com/wordtracker

Click on the link for Keyword Report and you will receive the top 500 keywords people are searching for delivered to you by email every week. Then use the Overture and 7Search keyword tools to find more specific keywords you can build websites and web pages around. This is a great strategy and a great way to get started making money with your own theme website and web pages around that theme.

Remember this simple point. People go to the internet to find information. They will type in all kinds of keyword phrases and variations of those keywords. The more web pages you can build targeting those specific keywords the better off you will be when it comes to increasing your website traffic and making more money online.

Copyright 2004 Jeff Schuman

About The Author

Jeff Schuman is using this strategy to create new websites around specific keywords relating to a theme. You can see his Top 10 Make Money and Top 10 Small Business Websites here:

http://www.teamschuman.com

http://www.sitesplus.com

This article was posted on December 21, 2004

by Jeff Schuman