Understanding Yandex

Tips for promoting a website in Yandex

[Gizbo]

Hi,
I am working on promoting a site in Russia and as I understand the main search engine there is Yandex.ru.
I would appreciate any tip or useful information anyone can give me about promoting a site in Russian and specifically in Yandex. Things like:

Main network sites in Russia
Unique internet tools that are specific for Yandex
What are the main issues to address when promoting a site in Yandex?
Is there a way to know how many search results there are for a phrase in Yandex? Right now when I look at the results I get a different number for each word in separate and not for the whole phrase.
Take under consideration that I don’t speak the language, (Russian).
Thanks for your help

[Meddy]

Hi!

I am afraid for those who do not speak Russian it will be really sometimes difficult to work with Yandex. But I can suggest some tools that will make the work easier and that can be used quite fine with the help of Google translator.

[wordstat.yandex.ru...] - Statistics of search requests - (to understand how hot the request is, to select a semantic). I think Google translator will help understand what fields are for which purpose in the forms.

[yaca.yandex.ru...] - Adding of a website to the Yandex directory. You apply for free. Adding is not guaranteed, but if you succeed it will give you some advantages in promotion.

[webmaster.yandex.ru...] - is a service that gives you information about indexing of your websites. It lets you inform Yandex about new and deleted pages, set up the website indexing and improve the website position in search results.

[direct.yandex.ru...] - The system of context advertising.

Irene

[Rumbas]

Thanks for your comments Meddy - I agree, it's kind of tough to use, submit and check rankings on a language you don't master. Good points though, thanks :)

[dstiles]

I've white-listed, as far as I can discover, the yandex bot IPs - they all have "spider" in their rDNS.

I'm now getting several hits purpoting to be yandex bots (the User-Agent is correct) but with rDNS names like sticker00.yandex.ru and piano2.yandex.ru; also the occasional "slovo". Does anyone know what these IPs are doing? Are they some kind of alternative bot, maybe a slightly different function (eg for thumbnails), or perhaps just badly named?