Yahoo is largest search engine. Actually, that's not true. Yahoo is not technically a search ENGINE. It is a human compiled directory of websites and does not have a spider bot going to sites and indexing them. But, for sake of this article when I say "search engines", I am referring to search engines and directories, like Yahoo.

Did you know that recent estimates show that Yahoo is currently capturing an amazing 40% of all search engine traffic online? Do you know what this means? That means that almost 1 out of every 2 people who do searches on Internet use Yahoo, everyone on Internet has done searches at one time or another.

Nothing in world should be clearer to anyone with a website after reading above figures -- you need your site listed on Yahoo. A.S.A.P.

RECAP

If your site is not listed in YAHOO INDEX, you are losing lots of potential customers to competitors whot are listed with Yahoo. And with amount of visitors Yahoo can send you even with an average listing... this could amount to hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of lost profits.

Note - being listed under "webpages" does not mean you are listed in Yahoo. It means you are listed with Google. Yahoo gets its "webpage" results from Google.

How to submit to Yahoo:

First you have to determine scope of your site. Is your site commercial or non-commercial? Commercial sites that want to be listed must use "Business Express" when submitting. This used to cost $199, however price has risen to $299 a year.

"Business Express" what is it? Good question and one that many people ask, well it's basically same as free submit except that with business express your site is guaranteed to be reviewed within a week's time. However please be aware that it does not guarantee that your site will be accepted and added to Yahoo index. If your site is rejected Yahoo will allow you to appeal for free within a certain time scale (usually 30 days) of being informed of your rejection. Also Yahoo staff usually tells you reason you have been rejected. Examine these reasons; fix any problems and resubmit after a week or so.

If your site is a non-commercial site, you will still be able to submit for free, but a review could take as long as 8 weeks or might never happen at all.

Before you submit, make sure your site is 100% ready. Under

construction pages need not apply to Yahoo because they are not going to get in. Your site should be aesthetically pleasing to reviewer. It should be quick loading and should have lots of content.

OK; let's get started. How does Yahoo return results? Search results on Yahoo are determined by words that appear within these four areas:

1) Category

2) Title

3) Description

4) URL

These sites are then sorted by relevance using an automated algorithm.

I will now go through these four different factors and how to optimize your submittal for each one. First up category selection: Many people don't realize this but when someone searches for a term(s) on Yahoo, it's algorithm searches through category name also. For example, visit www.yahoo.com and you will see results for a search on 'Internet Marketing'. You will see under each listing that these words are highlighted if they are in name of category, top listing has most occurrences of these words between its title, description, URL and words in category it's in.

Over last 3 years we have seen a growth in Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engine model. This was initially fashioned by Overture, but has quickly been followed by a whole host of Pay Per Clicks.

The concept is extremely simple. You bid on words that surfers who would be interested in your website's content would use to search on. For example, if your website was about gardening...you may bid on words "garden care" or "lawn care" etc. When someone searches on words "garden care", search results are returned in order of bids placed; so a website with a 60 cents bid would rank higher than one for 55 cents and so on.

Obviously, you will want to make sensible bids that your business can sustain. The best way to know what is affordable is to look at your website stats of visitors against your sales. If your profit last month was $1,000 and you had 400 unique visitors your profit per visitor (PPV) would be $2.50. If you had 20000 unique visitors your PPV would drop to $0.50. This is a rule of thumb as not all visitors are equal - some visitors are more qualified than others and visitors from PPC Search Engines are often most qualified around. these Pay Per Click tips will help you.

PPC Search Engines are best valuable advertising currently available. If you write a good website and expert title and descriptions with your listings, qualifying your visitors is a relatively direct task. How can you make most of PPC search engines...great question and here are 10 excellent tips!

Bidding on low cost relevant words Brainstorm of all those great little words that are relevant. These are a great source of qualified traffic. With research and creativity you can come up with hundreds of low cost search phrases targeting your potential customers for just a few cents each. When it comes to Pay Per Click tips, this is arguably, one of most important to note.