How to get your site listed in Yahoo Search

Yahoo Search is one of the major search engines on the internet. It along with the likes of Ask, Bing, and Google are the big ones. If you want your web site or blog to get maximum exposure, then it is important that you get listed in Yahoo Search. However, sometimes Yahoo can be a tough cookie, but it is a good search engine and is not the disaster Bing is.

Often times Yahoo has the tendency of not listing your site for a very long-time, and then one day your site will magically appear it their search results. Now in the SEO world, this is not the optimal strategy one wants to take to get their site listed. You will often times hear that putting your link on a site that is indexed by Yahoo will get you indexed, and while that is true it is not the way most people would like to handle it. I think most people want to be in control of their own destiny when it comes to Yahoo search, and I am here to help you achieve that.

So what is the best way to get Yahoo Slurp, Yahoo’s Search Crawler,  to visit your site and chew on your web pages? It is actually quite simple. I will lay out the steps below to make it very easy.

1. Robots.txt file – Ensure you have a robots.txt file in the root of your sites directory, and that it includes a directive similar to the following:

User-Agent: Slurp

Disallow:

The directive above tells the Yahoo Slurp crawler to index your entire web page. You can modify the directive as you see fit if there are certain parts of your site you don’t want indexed.

2. Yahoo Site Explorer – You can use Yahoo Site Explorer to verify and submit your web page. So use Yahoo Site Explorer to verify your site similar to Google Webmaster Tools, and submit your site through it. This will give Slurp a nudge to come visit your site at some point. Also, submitting your RSS feed and xml sitemap to site explorer will help the process along as well.

3. My Yahoo - The last step is to create a My Yahoo page and add your web site or blog’s RSS feed to your customised My Yahoo page. It seems for some reason or another, that doing this step will cause Yahoo Slurp to chew on your web page and index your pages.

This is the basic SEO that is required to get your site listed in Yahoo Search. Please don’t confuse Yahoo Search with the Yahoo directory. As the directory costs money to get included in if your a business, and is free for non-commercial web sites, however, the waiting period can be very long on non-commercial listings in the Yahoo Directory.

It must also be noted that many people use Yahoo Answers to get their site to rank better in Yahoo, however a word of warning on that. when using the Yahoo Answer service, spamming your link in your answers can get you banned by the service, and Yahoo may look at your site in a bad light for doing it. Only post your link in Yahoo Answers if it has relevence to the question being asked, and it has genuine unique content to answer the question presented.

As for blog owners, signing up for a MyBlogLog account will also help your blog out in Yahoo, and give you a few relevent backlinks since it is a Yahoo powered service. It will also help increase your overall blog readership. I hope these few helpful tips herp with get your site listed in Yahoo. All comments welcome!