Customer Solutions closed on New Year’s Day

Just a reminder, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Customer Solutions department will be closed on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, 2007. We encourage you to manage your account online that day, or submit a support request and we’ll respond as quickly as possible after we reopen on January 2.

Happy New Year!

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Here are ten fun facts about Christmas, compiled in ten minutes, using Yahoo! search.

• “Christmas” was the number one search on Yahoo! on Friday, Dec. 22. 2006.
  “God Jul!” is Norwegian for “Merry Christmas!”; in Finland they say “Hyvää Joulua!”, and in Ukraine, “Srozhdestvom Kristovym!”
• British leader Oliver Cromwell cancelled Christmas in 1645. No kidding.
• During the 1820s, Christmas Eve, not New Year’s Eve, was the big party night, sometimes ending in riots.
• More than 38 million households tuned into the movie, “A Christmas Story” during one Christmas Eve television marathon.
• The real-life Saint Nicholas lived in what is now Turkey, a long, long way from the North Pole.
• The first Christmas tree with electric lights was displayed December 22, 1882, by an Edison Electric Light Company VP.
• David Sedaris’ “SantaLand Diaries” first aired on National Public Radio in 1992.
• Twenty-eight oxen and 300 sheep: That’s what King Richard II of England’s guests ate at his Christmas feast in 1377.
• It takes 7 to 10 years to grow the average Christmas tree.
• Santa Claus is also known as: Father Christmas, Father Frost, Joulupukki, Kris Kringle, Saint Basil, Saint Nicholas, Sinterklaas and Weihnachtsmann… St. Basil?

Whatever your holiday traditions, all of us here at Yahoo! Publisher Network wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas.

—The Team

Phone support closed Christmas and New Year’s Days

It’s time to celebrate. So in observance of the upcoming holidays, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s customer support department will be closed on Monday, Dec. 25 and Monday, Jan. 1.

Please enjoy yourselves and stay safe.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Announcing the new Tagometer from del.icio.us

Those clever mash-up meisters over at del.icio.us—the social bookmarking website where the world collects its favorites—have been at it again. This time they’ve come up with a widget called the Tagometer that you can use to enhance your site, help drive relevant traffic and hook up with others of like interests. And, it’s free.

Like the static del.icio.us badge, the new widget includes a button inviting readers to bookmark your page on del.icio.us. The Tagometer takes it a step further, however, offering an up-to-date ticker of those who’ve already bookmarked the page, plus a list of the top tags.

Your users can click on the ticker to see more detail: who bookmarked your page, when they did it, and how they tagged it.

For more info, check out the del.icio.us blog.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

What You Told Us, and Advice from Yahoo! Team Members

Editor’s Note: Since September, we’ve posted a series of polls within our secure publisher interface asking a variety of questions on themes such as traffic, optimization and relevancy. Today’s post is a first in a series by Senior Insight Manager, Todd Lombardo, in which he will share some of your insights and provide some pointers from Yahoo! team members, with the aim of helping you become a better publisher.

Configuration optimization
First up, let’s talk about optimization, or making changes to your ad listings to improve performance. In a question from September 2006, we asked how often you change ad format–one way to optimize–and the answers broke out as follows:

Q: How often do you change your ad format (color, size or placement)?

Surprisingly, almost half of you told us you never make changes. Additionally, some free-form responses noted that you only make changes reactively, after you “see a huge decrease in revenue,” or “rarely,” “twice a year” and “as little as possible.”

However, being proactive in optimization could lead to improved performance and greater revenue. Margaret Holland, a Senior Account Manager here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network, finds that giving an ad format a chance to prove itself through comparison testing is a good way to see more positive results. She often counsels clients to test a category that is relevant to site users for a week, and then change to another relevant category for a second week, another for a third week, etc., and compare the results to work toward improvement.

There are two important reasons for doing this. One, by allowing a week, you give your category a chance to see if it works with your users. Two, better performance is not always in the most obvious categories; knowing your users can improve results. For example, news publication sites target high-end automobiles or investment ads to better target their demographics.

Optimizing Categories
In another poll question, we asked how many ad categories you’ve designated on your sites:

Q: How many different ad categories have you designated? 

Over half of you answered that you only designate a category at the site level. And through your free-form responses, some of you noted “1 or 2 per site”, “2 for entire site,” or “sometimes for certain pages.”

Cody Simms of Yahoo!’s Product Management team advises that focusing content development efforts at the individual page level rather than the site level could improve revenue performance with a contextual advertising program. Where possible, strive to make each web page oriented around a single specific topic. Our contextual ad engine performs best when a page has a clear topic associated with it.

Of course, the practicality of doing this all depends on the type of site that you run. If you are blogging, for example, you likely will not be adjusting the content on each page to fine-tune for contextual advertising. But if you are publishing product reviews or other forms of static content, this might work well for you.

Once you’ve focused content development at the individual URL level, you can then use our Reporting URLs or Reporting Categories feature to track performance for each specific page. Following our comparison testing example earlier, try making one small weekly adjustment to page content at a time and track your performance changes as a result.

For further insights into improving performance, Jennifer Slegg, a guest blogger back in May, had some good thoughts on optimization, as did our own Margaret Holland.

Are you optimizing more than our survey let on? Does the above advice ring true? What else do you think we should ask you about in our polls? Leave a comment and let us know!

—Todd Lombardo, Senior Insight Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network

Yahoo! offers a turn of the dreidel for the Festival of Lights

As the calendar year quietly draws to its close, people naturally turn to friends and family to help them celebrate their successes of the past year and help prepare them for the challenges to come—and in the process eat, drink and laugh a lot.

Today is the first day of Chanukah. Over the next eight days, families will gather to light candles, exchange gifts, munch tasty nosh and offer blessings. All of us at Yahoo! Search Marketing and Yahoo! Publisher Network would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Chanukah. 

—The Team

Yahoo! Answers turns one

At one, most human babies are hardly walking, let alone answering difficult questions. But our one-year-old, Yahoo! Answers has already provided 160 million answers to 60 million users around the world. For more on the birthday celebration, visit the Yahoo! Answers blog.

Yahoo! Answers taps into the need that people feel to connect with others through social media, to share knowledge and get their questions answered—in a sense, to personalize the online world. It’s a huge trend, according to a recent Harris Interactive survey. The survey says that fully a third of all adults online have used a Q&A site of one kind or another, and more than half of those say that the information they have gleaned has influenced a decision they made. Check out this press release on the study.

Web publishers, online retailers and the like may be able benefit from putting a Yahoo! Answers badge on their site and by becoming active members of the Answers community, such as SmallBizResource.com has done. By using the badge and answering questions, web publishers can help grow their reputations as “gurus” in their fields, gaining user trust and helping drive traffic. For example, if you have a site that deals in, say, Apples and Oranges, it’s easy to put a badge on your site that allows people to ask questions—which you can then answer—about those tasty fruits.

For more info on how you can use Yahoo! Answers on your own web pages, go to the Answers Web Services page on Yahoo! Developer Network.

Happy Birthday, Answers team. Now blow out your candle.

—Michael Mattis

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

This expression has become common in our pop culture. It refers to something that you may not be into but, if others like it, that’s OK by you. It’s a “different strokes for different folks” kind of world.

We try to reflect that same sense of choice at the Yahoo! Publisher Network. We match our ads to your site’s content as best we can, but we don’t expect you to display ads that you think your users won’t want, or ads for businesses that compete with yours. Thus, we developed Ad Blocking, a feature that we recently updated.

As suggested by its name, Ad Blocking allows you to block ads from a given domain or multiple domains that you don’t want to appear on your site. To activate Ad Blocking, just click on the “Ad Setup” tab in the secure account interface and hit the “Ad Blocking” tab. You can block up to 200 domains.

There are two levels of Ad Blocking:

Domain-Level Blocking: Entering, say, “mycompetitor.com” will block ads pointing to the entire mycompetitor.com domain. This is the broadest form of blocking. Note that in order to do this, you must enter the domain URL without the “www” domain prefix.

 

Sub-Domain Level Blocking: Entering “products.mycompetitor.com” will block ads pointing to only the products.mycompetitor.com sub-domain. Ads pointing to www.mycompetitor.com (with the “www” prefix) or a different sub-domain, such as “people.mycompetitor.com,” will not be blocked.

For more info on Ad Blocking, see our FAQ’s.

—The Team

Editor’s Note: Getting noticed by users is priority one for publishers who want to be successful. We’ve already discussed various ways to bring users to your site, from simple SEM strategies to using Site Submit, and of course, Sponsored Search. But there’s even more to marketing your site than those essentials. In the first part of our series on marketing for small and mid-sized publishers, veteran marketer Lee Odden, president and founder of TopRank Online Marketing and the author of Online Marketing Blog, offers a round-up of low-cost marketing tips that can help you get your site noticed by the right users. 
 

Getting your web site noticed

With billions of documents indexed on the Internet, small- and medium-sized businesses can sometimes be overwhelmed by the prospect of getting their sites noticed online. Here are five basic tips for attracting visitors and keep them coming back for more.

1. Market offline, as well as online
This piece of advice is as true today as it was in the 20th century. Publish your web site address everywhere you publish your phone number, including signage, print advertising, direct mail, business cards, hold music, brochures and other collateral.
You can also promote offline using a little old-fashioned public relations:

• Research relevant local business and industry publications.
  Find out who the editors and journalists are who write about topics related to your business and industry.
• Write your own articles about the thing that is unique about your web site or business, and the solution or information you provide.
• Suggest the article for publication to the editors of local newspapers and related publications, as well as to writers for relevant industry newsletters, journals and magazines.

Other article and print promotion ideas include:

• Interviews with high-visibility members of your industry
• Lists of suggestions, such as “5 Ways You Can ____ With _____”
• Letters to the editor
• Contests and promotions

2. Announce your site
There are many ways to let people know that you’ve launched a new site, including press releases, emails to friends, clients and prospects, commenting on blogs and communities with similar interests, and targeted pay-per-click campaigns. If you issue a press release, be sure to include keywords in the title and body copy. Use a wire service like PRWeb.com to distribute your press release, and for visibility on the major news search engines like Yahoo! News. Also send links to the press release, along with a few story ideas, to your local newspaper and any industry publication contacts you have from following the suggestion above

To learn more about how you can optimize your press releases, here’s an article on my TopRank blog that you may find useful.

3. Market with a blog

Speaking of blogs, one of the most productive things that small and medium businesses can do to help attract and increase traffic is to start blogging. Blogs are inherently well structured and search engine-friendly. By posting at least a few times a week on topics that are relevant to your audience, you can build up a sizeable subscriber base. It is ideal if the blog is part of your web site, such as www.mydomainname.com/blog or blog.mydomainname.com. There are lots of free and low-cost blogging options available.

Here is a list of 25 tips to market your blog that you may find useful.

4. Optimize content and links
A substantial amount of traffic is available to your site from search engines provided that the search engines can understand, categorize and rank your content. Be sure to use unique title tags on all pages of your site. Also include keywords in the on-page headings, in the body copy, and in links between pages.

Don’t overdo it, though. A good rule of thumb to follow is that if it sounds good when you read the content out loud, then it will likely read well for your visitors. Seek out opportunities to gain links to your site from topically relevant and authoritative web sites. Examples include industry associations, special interest groups, community organizations, as well as directories like Yahoo! Directory that have relevant categories. Contributing articles to online publications and engaging the blog community are also excellent ways to attract links. But ultimately, the very best way to attract links is to produce content that is unique, useful and worth linking to—which leads us to…

5. Keep your content fresh
Once you’ve attracted visitors to your web site, keep them coming back by adding new content on a regular basis. As mentioned above, a blog is an excellent tool for adding keyword-rich content that search engines interact well with. Blog software can be used to archive press releases, newsletters, frequently asked questions and customer testimonials, as well as a communications tool for product announcements, special news and commentary about your industry.

Bonus tip
Make sure you install web analytics software on your web site to track the results of your marketing efforts. While this seems less like a bonus tip and more like an obvious marketing step, many businesses fail to properly monitor, refine and measure their online marketing results. Properly measuring site traffic, time on the site and conversions can make the difference between a profitable site and a failure.

There are very few “silver bullet” tactics for web site promotion, but using a combination of the above tactics will increase awareness of your site, attract new visitors and keep them coming back for more.

—Lee Odden, president and founder, TopRank Online Marketing

Yahoo! partners are using APIs in creative ways

In addition to our self-serve advertising platform, the Yahoo! Publisher Network acts as a one-stop for all things publishing. And, we’re developing new services all the time, including business, search, content and social media services.

Some of the latest of these have been implemented among what we call our “strategic partners”—these are large, non-self-service partners such as Nikon and ESPN Sports Travel. We’re sharing some examples of these implementations with you so you could see for yourself how publishers can benefit from these services—and gauge your interest in learning more.

Yahoo! Shopping API
Gourmetfoods101.com uses the Yahoo! Shopping API in a way that’s similar to Sponsored Search. The partner makes a request, (e.g., a search on products) and an XML feed is delivered that allows the partner to integrate the content into its site. When a user clicks on a product link that goes to the advertiser’s site, the partner earns a portion of the revenue.

Gourmetfoods101.com

For more on Yahoo! Shopping APIs, visit the Web Services page on Yahoo! Developer Network.

Yahoo! Maps
ESPN Sports Travel uses the Yahoo! Maps API to deliver a media-rich content experience that includes satellite imagery, giving golfers a much better feel for a given course than a static map would. Duffers planning their round can zoom in, zoom out and navigate around via click and drag. Detailed information can also be plotted: For example, restaurant locations can be displayed, and clicking on the location can generate a pop-up with contact information and hours of operation.

ESPN Sports Travel Golf Course Viewer

For more about Yahoo! Maps APIs, visit the Maps Web Services page on Yahoo! Developer Network.

Yahoo! Answers
SmallBizResource (SBR), an online repository of information for small business, utilizes the Yahoo Answers API to let users help one another, foster community and drive retention. The API allows users to search questions and find answers right from the SmallBizResource.com interface.

SmallBizResource.com

In addition, Answers.com recently added Yahoo! Answers content across the site, including on topic pages. 

Answers.com

For more about Yahoo! Answers APIs, visit the Answers Web Services page on Yahoo! Developer Network.
 

Flickr
Nikon, a well-known name in photography, makes extensive use of the Flickr API on its Stunning Gallery promotional site. The implementation, which employs Flash, lets users easily scroll through photographs and zoom in and zoom out via Flickr while remaining on the Stunning Gallery site. Users can click on any photo and be taken to Flickr to learn more about it.

Nikon Stunning Gallery

For more about how to use the Flickr API, and to view more examples, visit the Flickr Services page.

Interested in hearing more about how our strategic partners are creatively implementing Yahoo! Services? Leave a comment and let us know.

—Mike Vargas, Director, Product Marketing and Michael Mattis, Blog Editor