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Usability and Search Engine Optimization Enhance Yahoo!'s Site Match  

:: Wednesday, March 03, 2004 ::

Now, more than ever, if you want your web pages to rank well, come up in searches, and lead to sales, you have reason to bring persuasive usability techniques into your design arsenal. Why? Yahoo!'s new Site Match program will work hard for your pages, but you will have to convince Yahoo! reviewers and searchers your pages are worthy of anyone's attention and money.

Google remains a free search engine, but the rules to stay in its database or rank high are confusing and frequently change. Since it began, I've hated their principle behind the link algorithm. In Google, your website worth depends on who links to you. (Among other things of course.)

Or it was. Barry Swartz (RustyBrick)wrote, in his coverage of the Organic Listings Forum at the SES NYC Conference:
     "Paddy Bolger said now you can be hurt from links. For example, if your site is linked to by a major authority, Google might remove your site because there is no need for you to be there, since you have a link from the authority site. Its not a penalty but more of a filter."

With Yahoo!'s Site Match, despite its price tag for review and clicks, there's less of a fear factor. The page is reviewed. If accepted for inclusion, it's assigned to a targeted category. Organic SEO, including our old meta tag friends and keyword targeted content, help with rank.

In all honesty I'm still not entirely sold on the Site Match offer, but what trips my trigger is the lack of mystery and better overall control involved with the whole search engine submission process. For free, Google can play as many head games as they wish to and experiment with their system, which we know wreaks havoc on SERPS (and often your sales) on a regular basis. For free, there is no control. For a fee, at Yahoo!, there's advantages. Some of them are still being brought to light and reviewed by professional SEO/SEM's.

The smart SEO/SEM's will hire usability experts to test pages before submitting them to search engines, or include usability site reviews that cover user centric and heuristic elements, as well as, and even more vital, the desirability and persuasiveness of the site and the pages submitted to Site Match.

Make every click pay for itself.

One website that offers affordable website checks that include SEO and Usability is James Saunders' Site-Report.com. This company offers services in both the UK and USA (and elsewhere).

Which I'd Been There Moment:

The Site Match Stink
     "Naturally, the issue of pricing came up. Prices for Site Match start out at $49 for the first URL and $10 - $29 for every additional URL submitted. This doesn’t include the cost-per-click fee, which is fifteen to thirty cents per click and varies depending on the industry.

A woman named Jackie Jahosky with Specialty-Life.com stood up to Yahoo by telling Tim that the pricing is going to kill small businesses. Her company is a one person drop-shipping business. She works on a small markets so that price just won't work for her.

“I just don’t like it,” she said. This resulted in the audience applauding her with claps and cheers."

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 3/03/2004 10:27:28 AM

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