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 links to my site on internet are pointing to .com and my email address uses .com.

She was unmoved. She asserted that this was best and only way to solve 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 “solution”. 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 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 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.

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.

Hopefully, those examples give you a fairly good idea of benefit of using these two powerful practices. For more about using CSS, I can recommend downloading sample chapters from Dan Shafer's book, HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS, at SitePoint.com.

Besides these two optimization techniques, however, we're also hearing about all kinds of ways to optimize our web sites for search engines these days. The competition for those coveted top placements is fierce, for sure. We've heard all about how important it is to have good, pertinent content in textual portion of our pages, how effective it can be to include our site's keywords within alternate attributes (i.e, ALT="keyword") of our image tags, and how valuable a link to/from a high traffic, like-minded web site can be. All this is certainly true and well worth effort to make our web pages rank higher in search engines, but with all this improvement to web site maintenance, what is downside? Well, take note, so you can say you saw it here first.

I've detected two pesky problems in this web page wonderland. One is absence of navigational links for search engine spiders to follow, and other is possibility of javascript-disabled web browsers. That's right; as fabulous as it is to store our navigational menu in one javascript file for easier updating, it removes all key links from our start page so search engine spiders have no other pages left to index on our site, and javascript-disabled web browsers can't see a menu at all! What's a webmaster to do? Well, here's how I decided to handle it.

I put my navigational menu with its various links to all my site's other pages on two key pages: start page and site map page. This way, when search engine spiders come calling, they can follow every link from my navigational menu to every other page on my site, and, at least, javascript-disabled web browsers will still have a menu to follow. The same is true of my site map page. For all rest of my pages, however, I decided to leave intact line of code calling javascript file containing my navigational menu in order to take advantage of its centralization benefits. The more pages I add to my site over time, more beneficial this approach will be, too. I see it as having best of both worlds: easy site maintenance and search engine optimization.

So, if you want to lighten your web site maintenance load while keeping your site optimized for search engines, I recommend using CSS to consolidate your site's style attributes, to include a tableless, yet table-like, appearance and centralization of a single javascript file containing your navigational menu. Just don't remove your navigational links from your start and site map pages.

You can visit either of my two web sites at http://webmarketersguide.com or http://www.parsonplace.com to see how I've done this. You're welcome to email me anytime at info@parsonplace.com with any questions or comments.