Putting spiders to work for you with Yahoo! Search Submit

We’ve talked about Yahoo! Search Submit in general terms before. It’s a fast and relatively cheap way to help your site get better exposure in Yahoo! “organic” search results. Today we offer a glimpse into how Search Submit works and how it can benefit certain publishers and e-commerce site owners.

Not-so-Creepy Crawlies
A Web spider is an automated script that methodically crawls the World Wide Web locating sites for display in search results. It would be virtually impossible to know what is on the Web moment-to-moment without this tool to scan for relevant sites. On the other hand, the extremely dynamic nature of the Web poses a problem for Web spiders, which slowly index the latest updates to the millions of sites on the Web.

Search Submit is for those seeking to increase their site’s chances of displaying in non-sponsored (algorithmic) search results. It also can help your most pertinent URLs get displayed in response to a search related to your site content. Search Submit comes in two flavors, Basic and Pro, with the Pro version offering the advantage of providing greater control over the way your listings are presented, helping to raise your “click appeal.”

Compare the standard Web spider search engine refresh rates of every two to six weeks with Search Submit’s search engine site updates of every 48 hours. Even if your site is updated infrequently, you may still want to think about Search Submit should any of the following apply to you:

• Your site is not optimized for Web spiders. Many Web spiders have difficulty indexing sites containing rich media or framed pages.
• Your site contains several pages detailing product or other inventory. A searcher entering keywords related to your products may not see your product pages in search results if the spider has not indexed your latest additions.
• Your site contains seasonal offers. Often these special offers need to be made available to searchers more frequently to take advantage of a particular timeframe.

—Stephanie Bilberry, Yahoo! Search Marketing Writer