Forum Moderators: mack
I am a business consultant and have just been given an assignment to optomize client's site, a commercial shopping site. Ok, I have already read a ton but am confused, should I pay for Yahoo Express or just submit to OPD ot hoping to get into Google? Second in OPD, can I have multiple listing? as we sell imported gourmet foods and also gift baskets? Also should do I want robots to crawl to my site?
So many questions,
Thanks a million
I suggest reading the submission instructions/guidelines available through the add url link on dmoz.org. Shopping sites do not “normally” obtain multiple links which you will see referred to as “deeplinks”. If the site is primarily affiliate links (not saying it is) for products you will probably not get a single listing. It is entirely up to you to decide if the Yahoo yearly fee is worth it to your client ;)
Lets get at those questions one by one.
First: Getting into Google's index requires a site to have links from other sites pointing to it. You can get links from any other site willing to give you a link for free.
Getting a listing in Yahoo or the ODP is usually a very good way to get into Google's and many other search engines indexes.
Apart from that a site gets traffic directly from Yahoo or the odp when listed there.
For the ODP you probably will get only one listing with a small to medium shopping site even if the site sell two product lines. You will have to decide if the site is better suited for a regional shopping category or a category dedicated to one of the two product lines.
With Yahoo commercial sites need to go through the paid submission. Fees are steep, but the listing is up in a couple of days and from there gets picked up quickly by Google.
As to the robots: Yes you will want the robots to spider your site. Spider index your site so that it gets into the index of the search engines.
The links from other sites or from directories just inform the search engines your site exists. The engines then send out their spiders to index your site.
In order to make your site indexable you should either put up a robots.txt. here is a basic tutorial:
[searchengineworld.com...]
If you do not want to do that, then make sure you do not have any meta information in the head section of your pages telling the spiders to go away.
Hope that helps - don't hesitate to ask for further clarification.
Metatags: you should have those:
<title></title>
<meta name="description" content="">
<meta name="keywords" content="">
The title is the most important one. Do a short sentence, beginning with your most important keyword/keyphrase. Don't repeat this more than once in the title. 5-10 words should be enough.
Meta description can be a bit more dexcriptive. Make it so that a reader would like to go to your site. Include keywords/keyphrases, but don't repeat more than once.
Meta keywords is of minor importance, but you might as well put all your keywords, but not more than lets say 10 or so in there.
As to the ODP submission there is a great tutorial here on the board:
[webmasterworld.com...]
With Yahoo and ODP alike the first and most important step is to identify the best category for you.
Take the one that best describes your site. Drill down in the categories, don't take a general one. That would likely get your site delayed or pushed to a cat you wouldn't want to be.
Make sure your site works okay. No broken links, navigation working, no passwords required etc.
As to the description: try to work your keywords in, but be very careful. Don't use overly promotional language, don't use superlatives. Be short. Ideally your meta description should look very similar to the description you give when applying for directories.
A couple of questions; here we go...
I would like to revise meta desciption as a few changes were made in text on the home page and I want to make sure we maintain congruency. As some spiders have already picked up , is ther any risk in revising?
Second-I am planning on submitting to Yahoo Ex as a commercial site, however we are already a Yahoo store, does this mean we are also in the directory? I am thinking yes, because when I enter our meta description our site comes up first. So is sumbmitting to Yahoo ex moot? I have to say Yahoo stores is yielding my client nada!
Can you help?
Thanks again.
When you search on your Yahoo store, if there is a category link under it in the Yahoo search results, you are already in.
I'm new here and have gotten great help n a few other forums. I am a consultant asked to market a clien't web site, a commercial on line store and find that the web designer, an ad agency did not add in any meta tags, nothing not even a title. Then I also find out they put him a Yahoo store but did not submit in the Yahoo shopping index. To me this seems very sloppy. Am I right? Who is responsible for these issues?
Thanks as always
Australiangirl
Inclusion into a search engine is beyond most web design companies (excluding those who lurk here, of course), and more so for marketing agencies. In general, overlooking search engine traffic is the norm in those industries.
Ignoring the title tags is incredibly sloppy. I wouldn't worry about meta tags, although the meta description is nice to have as some serps quote from them.
Basically there's one main difference: The title shows in the browser of your visitors, the meta descritption does not.
Both are very important. I would seriously consider writing them yourself, following the instructions above.
australian girl:
...and what is a serp?
That's a new term to me too, but I think the point was some search engine results pages quote from the description.
A few pointers: in keywords include synonyms and common misspellings (although Google is incredibly good about catching users' misspellings) and make title and description fully descriptive.
