If you were to follow the link above the photo, and then scroll down just a tiny little bit, you’ll find this little content widget in the right column which — at the moment I’m typing this — is showing 16 photos from MY Flickr photostream. Yowza! Four photos appear at a time, and there’s a nice Ajaxy scrollbar that will show the rest of the photos when you click the arrows. It looks like this:

What’s the Point?

This opens up yet another door for any local business with a photographic/visual element to acquire eyeballs. Keep in mind that Yahoo News is the No. 1 news site online (wish I could find a link for that), so this is not an opportunity to ignore. I’ve written before about how to market on Flickr, so that’s a good place to get started if you’re not on Flickr yet.

Optimizing Flickr Photos for Yahoo Local News

From what I can tell, this is really simple. It doesn’t matter what title or description you give your local photos. Links don’t matter. Comments, favorites … who cares?!

There’s only one thing you need to do to have a shot at showing up in this Yahoo Local News widget: Geotag your photos via the Organizr tool on Flickr. All 16 of my photos appearing on the Yahoo Local News page above are geotagged to a specific location.

But, are there any traffic benefits?, you ask. Well, I only heard about this because my photographer friend, Phil, noticed some of his Flickr photos were getting increased traffic from the Pittsburgh, PA, page on Yahoo Local News.

Since it only takes about 3 minutes to geotag Flickr photos, and you can do it in batches, why not spend the time and see if you can get some photos into Yahoo Local News?

(This post was written last week and scheduled for posting today.)

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

How to Put Your Flickr Photos into Yahoo News

Brian Gil, Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Local, told me today that the company is aware of recent reports on the eClick Performance blog and on Search Engine Land. I asked him about the overall response to Yahoo!’s “Consumer Submit” program, which allows users to make edits to business listings on Yahoo! Local, and specifically about the affiliate hotel “spam” reported this week:

“We haven’t seen what I would categorize as significant abuse issues. I’m not going to speak specifically to the hotel thing. That one is a unique case. We have been looking into it…. We’ll take the appropriate action, but my gut is telling me that it’s not nearly as suspect as what was written up. “

Brian did explain that there are times when businesses want to use a unique URL in their business listing for tracking purposes, but this didn’t appear to be one of those cases. I asked him if Yahoo! was aware of the potential for abuse when Consumer Submit launched in late 2006:

“Yes. Whenever we roll out a service like that, we always couple it with increased fraud prevention measures. We don’t just throw more people at it, because oftentimes a person couldn’t even detect a pattern of spam. So, we always complement our human moderation team with automated controls, some of which will automatically reject submissions if it determines that something’s gotten out of hand. Or, it will just raise [an issue] as needing deeper investigation by human beings. All of that is in play, and we were very cognizant of the risk.”

It’s worth nothing that Google also recently announced that anyone will be able to edit business listings on Google Maps.

My conversation with Yahoo!’s Brian Gil today involved a variety of topics related to local search, small business, and, of course, Yahoo! and Yahoo! Local. Stay tuned for a more complete version of the interview in the next day or two here on SBS.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Yahoo Local’s Affiliate Spam: ‘A Unique Case’

Ratings (stars) are taken into account, but review text is not.

That’s word-for-word from Yahoo! today, who contacted both myself and Greg Sterling (who reported on my original post; don’t you love blogging?). It’s in reference to factors that influence which listings get shown in a Yahoo Shortcut on Yahoo’s main SERPs. (Both ratings and reviews are factors when you’re using Yahoo Local.)

Again, this was all in response to last week’s excellent Local & Blended Search panel at SMX West where the Yahoo and Microsoft reps shared a lot of quality information in response to audience questions. Let’s hope this dustup doesn’t discourage search engine reps from being so helpful in future panels, right?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Yahoo: It’s the Stars, Not the Reviews

That announcement uses a restaurant listing from Yelp.com as its example, and as soon as I saw it, I thought Man, that’s some nice exposure for Yelp, isn’t it?. Here’s the image they used:

People/webmasters everywhere read the Yahoo search blog, right? And that listing looks nice — it shows off the great content Yelp offers about this one local business. So, how’d they land that gig as the poster child of Yahoo’s new Open Search platform?

I suppose it could be purely coincidence, but I think this is how:

At the bottom of every business profile page on Yelp, right next to the “Write a Review” button, there are now links to view the appropriate category results page on Yahoo Local. And even better, those are followed links with terrific keyword usage in the anchor text.

So, yes, it looks like Yelp and Yahoo are dating. I’m no industry pundit, but it makes perfect sense given Yahoo’s understanding and appreciation of healthy online communities (Flickr, Upcoming.org, del.icio.us, etc.). And if the relationship grows, that could have a big impact on the local search landscape, don’t you think?

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Are Yahoo and Yelp Dating?

Yahoo! Answers is the #2 reference site on the Internet (behind Wikipedia). Its popularity provides an opportunity for smart online marketers to acquire targeted referral traffic, as well as indirect search engine traffic thanks to the site’s growing popularity in major SERPs — Google’s, in particular. Earlier in this series, I’ve talked about what YA is and why you should use it; in this final installment, I’ll share tips on how to use Yahoo! Answers for marketing and exposure.

How To Use Yahoo! Answers

First Things First: Professionals & Links are Allowed

Here’s one of the things I love about YA: They realize people like us are using the service. They don’t pretend we don’t exist, and they don’t equate anything commercial with spam. In a very well-written explanation of what’s spam and what isn’t, Yahoo! Answers realizes the business benefits their service offers:

There are many professionals and business owners providing valuable knowledge and experiences on Answers. By identifying yourself as such and providing great answers, you are building credibility and positive brand image.

Isn’t that a refreshing outlook from a social site? YA’s outlook on link drops is summed up in the Community Guidelines:

If you have years of experience in something, have a special hobby, own your own business, or if you are a knowledge partner, it’s OK to accompany a good, on-topic answer with a link to your website, blog, or email to offer more information. However, it is not OK to post links that are unrelated to the topic or are clearly meant only to solicit others for personal and financial gain.

(emphasis mine)

It’s important to note that any link you include in a question or answer will be nofollowed. Yahoo! Answers is not for link building; it’s for traffic building.

So, now that it’s clear you can use YA for commercial purposes within the rules, the obvious question is: How do you use Yahoo! Answers for marketing?

RSS is Your Friend

YA has a very nice categorical heirarchy, but you’ll go crazy trying to browse from category to category and keep up with all the questions available to be answered. Luckily for all of us, every category in the system has its own RSS feed. So, find the categories you want to follow and subscribe to the RSS feed. If you’re a YouTube expert, you’d go into the “Computers & Internet” category, then dig down to find the YouTube category, then look for the RSS link:

But wait, there’s more! If you don’t find the categories to your liking, use the search box and find questions that are in your wheel house. YA also makes an RSS feed available for any search you do. Sweet!

I should mention that the RSS feeds don’t always update as quickly as I’d like, so once or twice a week I do go to the site and spend some time looking for questions to answer. That’s where the next tip comes in.

Use Sorting Options

When you reach a category or sub-category, you’ll see the most recent questions. But you can also sort two other ways, and each has its own benefit:

• Sort by Date: Questions are open for four days by default, and users can extend a question once by an extra four days. I like to sort by date to find questions that are about to expire. If these questions have no answers, or only a couple answers, I can often go in and give the best answer of the bunch and get an easy 10 points for providing the best answer. This helps you build up your points profile, though it may not help much with the exposure and branding.
• Sort by No. of Answers: This is where you help your exposure and branding. You can sort by how many answers a question has to find the “hot” questions that are drawing lots of eyeballs. By providing a great answer, and including your link when appropriate, you have a chance to be seen by a lot of people and potentially get some traffic to your site/blog.

In case you’re wondering, I’ve seen no correlation between how many answers a question receives and how likely that page is to rank well in the SERPs.

Sign Your Name

When leaving an answer related to this blog, I always make sure to sign my name. Why? Because spammers don’t. Spammers just drop links in their answers and hit the next question. Signing my name should help distinguish my answers from those folks. At least I hope so. Here’s how I do it:

I don’t sign my name and include a link with every question. If I’m answering something about the Seattle Seahawks or Seattle Mariners, or the TV show LOST, leaving a link to this blog would fit the YA definition of spam: It’s off-topic. Don’t sign your name and include a link with every answer, just the good answers related to your line of expertise.

Don’t Spam

Just in case it needs to be said, I’m saying it. Here’s the link again to YA’s very helpful page explaining the line between marketing and spam.

Conclusion

My goal with this series was to show you how Yahoo! Answers might be a viable way to increase your exposure and branding as an expert in your field. YA is a highly-trafficked site that ranks behind only Wikipedia among Internet reference sites. Yes, there’s a lot of junk to wade through, but there are opportunities for the savvy professional. When used correctly, Yahoo! Answers can be a source of direct referral traffic, as well as indirect search engine traffic. Follow the guidelines, and as with any social media site, focus first on what you can give to the community rather than what you can get from it.

This concludes a three-part series on social marketing using Yahoo! Answers. If you missed earlier articles, please begin with the series introduction.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Part Three: How To Use Yahoo! Answers

Yahoo! Answers is a popular question-and-answer service that’s grown to be the #2 reference site on the Internet. With such heavy traffic, YA offers opportunities for some businesses and professionals to gain exposure, improve branding, and acquire web site traffic. And Yahoo! is perfectly fine with using the service this way, so long as you work within the site guidelines.

Why Use Yahoo! Answers

YA is a natural fit for any business where knowledge and expertise is your main sales tool. Providing helpful answers that benefit the community is a great way to brand yourself and attract new visitors to your web site. Retail businesses are less likely to gain much traction on Yahoo! Answers, although there are some categories in the YA system where knowledge of certain product types can be shared.

The clients I’ve worked with recently haven’t quite been appropriate for using a service like Yahoo! Answers. So, my experience in using YA for marketing purposes is completely in relation to this blog. I tend to read and answer in categories related to the Internet, online marketing, SEO, and social media; occasionally I’ll find some questions in sports or other categories. On a good week, I spend about an hour or two browsing the site and finding questions to answer. I also subscribe to a handful of category RSS feeds, and find questions to answer that way.

When you use YA successfully, it can be a great source of referral traffic, as well as an indirect source of search engine traffic. Let me explain….

My Results with Yahoo! Answers

For 2007, Yahoo! Answers was the #4 referral source to this blog, behind StumbleUpon, Sphinn, and Google Reader/iGoogle. Here’s the top seven:

I circled two columns on the right. You’ll notice that Yahoo! Answers sends me the highest percentage of new visits, and those visitors have the lowest bounce rate. In other words, these are people who’ve never been here before, and don’t leave as soon as they arrive. That’s a golden combination of traffic stats, and a big reason why I love Yahoo! Answers.

Search Traffic, Too

Yahoo! Answers isn’t only about referral traffic. Search spiders are crawling the site deeply, and YA pages are showing up more frequently in the SERPs. That provides an opportunity to get traffic that begins at Google, Yahoo!, or MSN, and then goes through a YA page where you’ve left a helpful link. Consider this Google SERP for a search on the company name of a local search service:

That’s my own post coming in at #4 as I type this, and a Yahoo! Answers page coming in at #8. Well, when you click through to see the Yahoo! Answers page (link opens in a new window), you’ll see that another YA user — not me — answered a question with a link to Small Business SEM. Have a look:

The answer links to the same post that’s already up at #4 in Google’s SERPs, which means I indirectly have two of the top 10 search results for this company’s name — my own post, and the YA page which sends people to my post. Sweet.

So, how did that impact my traffic in 2007? Have a look at the top two sources of traffic to that post:

My own Google listing is #1, and the YA page is #2. I received an extra 4,251 pageviews thanks to Yahoo! Answers ranking highly in a Google search. Do you think your blog or site could use an extra 4,200 page views?

SERPs are always subject to change, but as I type this, here are some Yahoo! Answers pages that appear highly in various long-tail SERPs:

• “wisdom tooth help” - two of the Google top 10
• “life expectancy of goldfish” - two of the Google top 10 and #2 on Live Search
• “induce labor naturally” - #5 on Google
• “how fast does hair grow” - #2 on Google, #3 on Yahoo, and #1 on Live Search
• “eleven-sided” - two of the Google top 10 and #9 on Yahoo

Yep, it’s ironic that a Yahoo! property fares better in Google than in Yahoo! itself, but it’s no secret that Google loves authority domains/sites, and YA is becoming one of them.

The main point here in part two is that, if you use Yahoo! Answers wisely, there are opportunities to get direct referral traffic and indirect search traffic thanks to YA pages appearing in the SERPs.

Coming tomorrow in part three of this social marketing series: How To Use Yahoo! Answers.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Part Two: Why Use Yahoo! Answers

What Is Yahoo! Answers?

Yahoo! Answers (YA for short) is one of Yahoo!’s social media success stories. The question-and-answer service launched in December, 2005, and, according to Hitwise, it surpassed the market share of the now-defunct Google Answers within two months.

Usage Stats

In August, 2007, comScore listed Yahoo! Answers as the #2 reference site on the web, behind only Wikipedia. Yahoo’s own data from the same time shows the site with millions of users and millions of answers in the U.S. and across its 26 international versions. In December, Hitwise reported that YA gets about 1/6th the U.S. traffic that Wikipedia gets.

My very unofficial observations show users asking dozens of questions per minute at off-peak times of day, and upwards of 100 questions per minute during busy times.

How It Works

Obviously, YA is all about people asking and answering questions. There’s a point system in place that has no real reward other than status and authority. However, as you move up from one level to the next, you do gain additional privileges, such as being able to ask and answer more questions, rate other questions, etc.

You earn points mainly by answering questions, by having your answer judged “Best Answer”, and by having other users give your answers a “thumbs up.” You lose points when you ask a question. I asked a Yahoo rep about this not long ago and was told it’s an attempt to keep the quality and quantity of questions high. (Imagine how many crap questions people would ask if they earned points for posting a question!)

The system relies on community moderation to support the community guidelines. (Of particular note for our purposes is that the community guidelines do allow link dropping in some cases. More on that later.)

Users who successfully and correctly help report spam and support the guidelines can become trusted reporters. It’s very easy to report spam, and I’ve written before about how quickly spammy questions can be removed.

Social Elements

Your use of YA is, like many social sites, based around a profile page. Your profile page is where you (and any other user) can see your activity and points earned while using Yahoo Answers. It also keeps track of every question you’ve asked, answered, and marked as “interesting”. Here’s a peak at part of my profile page:

Like most social sites, you’re allowed to include a link in your profile. And like most social sites, that link is nofollowed. (see red circle) Yahoo! Answers is not a linkbuilding exercise; all links in your profile, your questions, and your answers are nofollowed.

Like any good social site, YA offers several common social features: you can add friends to grow your network, you can invite friends to join YA, you can send individual questions to friends, you can vote good or bad on other answers, and so forth. As you add friends and build your network, their questions will be highlighted for you on your profile page. For that reason alone, I suggest you build your network carefully. You don’t want a lot of low-quality questions taking up space on your profile page.

Coming tomorrow in part two of this social marketing series: Why Use Yahoo! Answers.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Part One: What Is Yahoo! Answers?

I’ve been using Yahoo! Answers for almost two years now; I started using it shortly after launching this blog. In that time, Yahoo! Answers has become a Top 5 source of referral traffic for me. Can it become the same for you? Perhaps. If you want to give it a try, I’ll share a plan of attack in this three-part series. Here’s what to expect:

Guide to Marketing on Yahoo! Answers

Monday: What Is Yahoo! Answers?
Tuesday: Why Use Yahoo! Answers
Wednesday: How to Use Yahoo! Answers

Stay tuned, and as always, feel free to ask any questions or add your own thoughts and advice as the series goes along!

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

A Guide to Social Marketing on Yahoo! Answers

That list comes from Yahoo! Buzzlog. It’s the blog associated with Yahoo Buzz, a service that tracks search trends on Yahoo. Since it’s a blog, the value of the content is hit-and-miss, but at times could be incredibly valuable to a small business. If you’re a costume retailer, for example, you might like to see the Top 20 “baby costume” searches on Yahoo in a recent week.

Maybe your small business is actually a new blog you hope to monetize. Okay, so you might be interested in the Top 20 “checklist” searches from a recent week, or the Top 20 “how to” searches. If that blog covers the TV industry, the Top 20 most-searched network programs would be great to know … or if it’s a sports blog you want to turn into a small business, a list of all 32 NFL teams ranked by search interest would help you decide who to cover most.

When I began at my current job almost a year ago, someone in the office asked if I used the Yahoo! Buzzlog for keyword research. Well, no … I don’t. We had a little discussion about keyword research for SEO purposes, and I stuck to my belief that tools like Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, etc., were the things we should be using, and that Yahoo Buzzlog had no benefit at all to an SEO project.

I still stand by that, at least where traditional keyword research is concerned. But I’ve also come to the realization that Yahoo Buzzlog is something search marketers should be reading. And I think anyone who generates content should be keeping an even closer eye on it. After all, the first step in search marketing is knowing what people are searching for.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

Yahoo Buzzlog: The Most Underrated Keyword Tool

The following will come off to some as sour grapes since I’m not on Rand’s / Lee’s list with my measly 55k links, but that’s okay.

The problem with using Yahoo for this kind of chest-pumping is that Yahoo counts just about anything it finds as an inbound link. To wit:

• Jeremy Luebke recently wrote on Marketing Pilgrim about Yahoo counting unlinked images on another site as inbound links.
• I can see from looking at my inbound links that it includes links from blog comments and
• links from scraper sites.

In a nutshell, Yahoo’s inbound link count can be as over-inflated as Google’s count is under-inflated.

That doesn’t apply across the board, however. Traditional business sites that don’t get their content scraped and whose URLs don’t get used in blog comments are likely to have more accurate link counts on Yahoo, and that’s why I don’t mind using Yahoo’s numbers when working with most clients. But the numbers get messed up when you start using them in relation to blogs, especially popular ones like the ones being discussed this week.

Update: Edited to show list source as Rand & Lee.

This is a post from Matt McGee's blog, Small Business SEM.

When NOT to Rely on Yahoo’s Inbound Link Counts