Advertising on Yahoo!

For businesses with a limited online-advertising budget, Yahoo!'s featured directory listings are a great way to reach out to millions of potential customers. Having your company's website featured in a directory listing is actually quite easy.

First, you'll need to get your site listed in the appropriate Yahoo! directory. Type your company name in to the search box. If your site doesn't appear in the search results, you will need to submit it for consideration. Unfortunately, this process can take a long time.

Your other option is to use Yahoo!'s Express Service, which provides expedited listing. There is a $299 annual fee for this service, and there's no guarantee that your site will actually be listed — only that it will be reviewed within seven days. However, if you don't want to wait a long time to be added to Yahoo's directory, this may be a solid choice.

Once your site has been listed in a directory at Yahoo!, upgrading to featured status is easy. You will need to pay a monthly fee, which is determined by the directory where your site is located. This fee can vary from $5 to $300 per month. All you need to do is provide a credit card and your monthly fee will be automatically deducted.

Featured listings appear before the rest of the businesses in a directory, which means that you won't have to worry about having your company buried far into the listings. This is also a benefit for business owners who are having difficulty optimizing their site for Yahoo!'s search engine.

So, what does featured status actually do for your site? It provides targeted advertising, and targeted advertising means the right people will see your listing: people already looking for your product or service. Once your business is featured in a directory, your listing will be one of the first results when customers perform a search in your area.

With more small businesses jumping on the internet every day, it's getting harder and harder for companies to retain their current customers and attract new customers. With literally thousands of choices for online shopping, it can be almost impossible to entice customers to visit your site first.

Having a featured listing removes much of this concern, since most users will click on the first match they find. If your site is at the top of the list, there's a much better chance your listing will be clicked on, as opposed to if your listing does not appear until page 20 of a user's search.

For businesses worried about advertising costs, Yahoo!'s fixed monthly fee is certainly a benefit. Knowing how much your advertising will cost each month makes it a lot easier to stay within your budget while still reaching out to millions of new potential customers.

Another way to guarantee appearing on Yahoo! is by buying keywords through Overture, a subsidiary of Yahoo. With Overture's pay-per-click products, you purchase keywords related to your business. Then, when Web surfers search for those keywords, your listing will appear in Yahoo!'s Sponsor Results box. Overture's distribution network also includes many of the internet's other top search engines and portal sites, including MSN, Altavista, and CNN.com.

With Yahoo! still holding on to the number two search engine spot behind Google, your business should see a dramatic increase of traffic once your site is listed in a directory, and much more should you choose to have your site featured.

Staying on top on the Web is never easy, but Yahoo! has made it possible for small companies to effectively compete for potential customers.