What are yours?

No, we don’t mean “go to the gym more often,” “lose weight,” “quit drinking coffee” or any of those physical impossibilities. We mean, what are your publishing New Year’s resolutions?

We want to know because we’d like to help you meet your goals—if you’re successful, we’re successful. Here are a few topic ideas to get you thinking, and some links to a few pointers that we’ve published since the blog launch last April:

To Better Engage Users
Getting users to interact with your content, and not just look at it, is a way to help keep them hooked. We’ve talked about this a lot in the past year, and have pointed the way to new Yahoo! APIs, mash-ups, widgets and badges from del.icio.us, Answers, Photos, Flickr, Maps and Upcoming.org, as well as Finance. Do these kinds of social media tools capture your fancy?

To Build Higher Traffic
More traffic, especially more of the right traffic, can often lead to more qualified clicks. On the blog, we’re currently in the middle of a series on guerilla marketing techniques to help you build your traffic. We posted the first of these articles in December. Be on the lookout for a lot more to come in 2007.

To Optimize My Ad Units
Should I put my ad units on the top or on the side? How many should I have on each page? What’s the most effective color? We’ve dealt with some of these questions before. Recently, we shared our research findings into how you optimize ad configuration and categories, and offered insight into improvement. Last spring we gave tips on ad placement and color matching. You’ll be seeing a lot more of this in future.

To Develop More Intriguing Content
Content is king. After all, what else do you want people talk about when they get to your site but your content? Creating good content is hard. But there are options. We’ve blogged about how you can use Creative Commons—the non-profit group that offers flexible-copyright content [what does flexible-copyright content mean?]—to ad “cred” to your site with authoritative content and share your own expertise with the world. Meanwhile, Jeremy Zowadny has elaborated on the Zen of blogging, and we’ve pointed you to a good source to help keep your site free of jargon. 

To Create a Better-looking Site
If there’s one thing famed blogstress Jen Slegg can’t stand, it’s an ugly website. Neither can I, I might add. To help turn publishers into aesthetes, we’ve been running a series on how to achieve good design. So far we’ve covered designing for the Web 2.0 style, leveraging research to design for your users, and on using patterns and pattern libraries to keep your look and feel consistent.

To Get Higher in Search Rankings
Everyone wants to get on top—especially on top of search rankings. We’ve blogged both about pay-as-you-go techniques, as well as SEM for everyone. Beginning next week, we’ll be running a series on optimizing your pages for search. Be sure to look for it.

Our New Year’s resolution here at Yahoo? To help do more good. Recently, Yahoo! for Good, in association with Network for Good launched Charity Badges. These customizable badges allow your users to donate to the charity or charities of your choice, right from your website. In addition, Yahoo! is giving a matching gift of up to $50,000 to the charity promoted by the top-performing Charity Badge.

We think that’s a resolution for good.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor and the Team