Yahoo Business Express Submission - Need Opinions

[ryence]

Hello Everybody,

I'm going to fork over the $200 it costs to use Yahoo! Business Express. I would like for you guys to do a quick check of my site and see if you can think of anything I'm missing, and what you think my chances of making the directory are.

My site is:
http://www.majorleaguecards.com

Description I am going to attempt to receive is:
100’s of players individually listed for your convenience.

Catagory:
http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Ec...ards/Baseball/

Thanks for the help and don't be shy
Kyle

[webstuff4free]

Hi There

Site looks good my friend but I did have to wait a long time to wait for the full page to load. It may be my connection today so others might like to comment.

I know many people sweat about getting things right like including things like privacy policy, contact address. Your contact address kinda looks stuck on the left there as a temporary measure - maybe I am wrong.

Anyway, my main point is that I got a clients site listed last month and we waited for almost the full review time for it to be looked at. Do you know how much they looked at????? The homepage and that was it!!!! A total time of 25 seconds from 1st request to last. When you have submitted you can check your logs for something like surfer.yahoo.com

I posted this to another forum when it happened and several other people found the same i.e. only 1-3 ages viewed. I am not sayig this always happens but I guess if they are real busy they may rush through them.

On another note I would take into consideration that the only things that can be searched on are the title and description. The one you have quoted doesn't mention baseball or cards - I'd try and get them in somewhere.

Hope this helps
Jason

[ryence]

Thank you for your reply. The speed seems pretty good to me, but I would like to hear how fast the site loads for other geek/talk members.

I'll have to re-write the Title before I submit. Should make sure I include baseball cards in there somewhere.

Look forward to hearing others.
Thanks,
Kyle

[webstuff4free]

Hi Kyle

I had another look at your site and it loaded much faster this time. It was definately me and I am sorry to have put the wind up you.

However, now looking at the site a little deeper I have noticed an alignment problem when viewing at 1024x768 resolution. Did you set it up at 600x800? When looking at something like the player list it sits well to the right and not right under the top navigation like I guess it should do. When I switch to the lower resolution everything sits fine. This is something that the reviewer may not like and it is easy to fix. It also pulls your box advert on the left into the right hand section and it sits directly in line under the "baseball cards" navigation

Further to your description it is a difficult task and you don't want to overdo it as it is not very nice if the decide to cut it down (often losing your keywords in the process) but you do need to make sure that you get that "baseball cards" phrase in there and hopefully something else too. Using "individually listed for your convenience. " is not much use as people will never search for it.

Try something like "Collectable baseball cards, large selection of Major League players"

It needs work but will home in on much more searches.

Have you got any that are autographed? Seems like people may also search for this. What about the years you cover. If it is only recent don't bother - if you have old ones mention it. I don't know much about baseball but seems like other sites puch this too.

While looking into your description I decided to look at your meta description tag and couldn't find one - you might like to consider adding this tag as it is what most of the major engines (except google) use for the displayed description in search results and as part of the ranking process. If you're looking for traffic you could be missing out here. The meta keywords tag is dying rapidly so you may/ may not want to bother with this but please at least use the description one.

Again, I hope this is of some use and if it brings up more questions please ask. Has anyone else got any input I am sure that we can all contribute to make this new listing as powerful as possible.

Jason

[zMan]

Tip:

Make sure to check out your website in Netscape before submitting for Yahoo! Express as many of Yahoo! editors still use Netscape. So it's a safe bet to make sure everything works & looks fine in Netscape.

Good luck. Let us know how it goes.