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Welcome To 1 Choice 4 Your Stores Yahoo Store Blog Packed With News, Information and Tips and tricks written specifically for Yahoo Store Owners By Store Owners covering Marketing, Design, SEO, and a whole lot more!

Monday, October 16, 2006

Your Meta Tags and Code are INCORRECT and this is hurting your rankings!!

Pretty scary thing to hear right?

Well let me tell you about a little company called Internet Advancement. I just got a call from this company. They called and asked if I was the owner of the website. Then informed me that my coding and meta tags are done improperly and this is hurting my search engine rankings.

*ding ding ding* Idiot Alert

This company has been around for years. Ever heard of them? If you did...it was not good.


Do not fall for this scam.

This company is a joke. They use scare tactics to make money of people who do not know better.

Here is an article that will help you to see how they were told to refund clients by the Attorney General Christine Gregoire:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html

Here is a recent customer http://badbusinessbureau.com/reports/ripoff189936.htm


You can find more if you need them.

The point is...do not let this happen to you!

If you have friends who own Yahoo stores tell them about the problem. Grab the link for this article and send it out.

Randfish from the seomoz.org said it best,

"All in all, this is one of the most despicable players I've seen in the spam/scam SEO game. It disgusts me to think of the thousands of dollars companies are paying every day to these clowns to get services that carry no business or marketing value whatsoever."

Read More here: http://www.seomoz.org/blogdetail.php?ID=815

by: 1 Choice 4 Your Store

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Sunday, October 15, 2006

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted - Part 3

It is time to finish up what we started regarding recent changes to Yahoo’s search engine. For those of you who need to catch up:

Yahoo! Search Changes

Yahoo search resources for webmasters

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted - Part 1

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted - Part 2

For the rest of you we head back to http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

We are now at Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent
popularity

Google really took care of this problem with the Jagger Update. Nice to see
Yahoo follow up as well. Basically if you are just adding links to have links so
that you can build your popularity, it is not going to work. Instead try
nonreciprocal links. They link to you but you do not link to them. Writing
articles is an inexpensive way to get good one way links to your store.

Pages built primarily for the search engines

Write for your customers and not for the search engines. They can tell when
keyword stuffing is going on and you will only be penalized for writing
horribly. Use Microsoft Word (or some other type of editing software) when
writing a lot of text and check for grammar and spelling.

Misuse of competitor names

This one used to be a big thing to do. Your competitors URL is MyUrL.com and
you buy MyUrl.net and use their name to get people in. Again it is a trick.
Search engines do not want to be tricked...Simple? Absolutely!

Multiple sites offering the same content

We keep telling business owners write unique content! But wait...this rule
does not apply to me. I don't build my site and then build 3 more exactly like
it. Well you see that is only half the problem. Over 75% of the websites we work
on are making this mistake. How? They have an item for sale. They go to the
manufacturer's page and copy the description. Easy and done. Here is the
problem...other companies do this too. And each company that does this is
another site offering the same content...including you.

Sites that use excessive pop-ups, interfering with user navigation

We have all visited one of "those" sites.

And finally.....the last one

Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent or provide a poor user experience

Reread the entire page again right now. It all leads up to this last rule. Do
not deceive, fraud, or be annoying.

Want to know how dating and search engine optimization is alike? Stay
tuned....

by: 1 Choice 4 Your Store

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Yahoo Store Design Wizard Is Here!!

Many of you may have noticed that during the last 2 weeks the Yahoo Store
Editor has had some issues. Such as unable to log in or being extremely slow.

Yahoo has done a HUGE upgrade to Yahoo Stores. There is now a Yahoo Store Design
Wizard which gives alot more control to store owners. There is also some much
needed upgrades to the basic Yahoo Store for SEO. They have now added
breadcrumbs, made item names into text, and even the left navigation is in text.
Great!! They have moved the shopping cart button to the top to help conversion
rates. Very nice! A header and footer are now added as well.

For customers who are getting their store completed by a programmer, be careful
what you touch. You could wind up wiping out your programmer's work with a touch
of a button.

More documentation can be found:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/edit/templates/

by: 1 Choice 4 Your Store

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Thursday, October 05, 2006

What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted - Part 2

Today we are once again focusing on the recent changes to Yahoo’s
search engine. For those of you who need to catch up:


Yahoo! Search Changes


Yahoo search resources for webmasters


What Yahoo! Considers Unwanted - Part 1



For the rest of you we head back to

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-18.html

We are now at Pages dedicated to directing the user to another page

Most of you have heard of a phrase called "doorway pages".

I suggest if you do not know more about doorway pages you check out this
wonderful article by clicking here

In this article the author Danny Sulivan explains: Webmasters are sometimes told
to submit "bridge" pages or "doorway" pages to search engines to improve
their traffic. Doorway pages are created to do well for particular phrases.
They are also known as portal pages, jump pages, gateway pages, entry pages
and by other names.

Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. This page explains how these pages are delivered
technically, and some of the problems they pose.

Remember you never want to do anything just for a search engine. You are
doing this for your customers. Stick with those rules and you will do just fine.

Ok Next - Pages that have substantially the same content as other pages

Again, we do not want to duplicate the content that is found on our site. Nor
we do we want to duplicate content that is found on other sites. The more
original and unique content on your site the better! This is especially true
when it comes to your item pages. If you are just copying the description that
everyone else is using as well...your pages are not unique.

Next - Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual hostnames

We all did it years ago. Buy up as many domains as we can with keywords and
point them all at our store and have a zillion URLs. As I said...we did it years
ago. Search engines are getting smarter! They are like the mother who has eyes
in the back of their head.

Next - Pages in great quantity, automatically generated or of little value

Again the search engines want good quality content. GOOD QUALITY CONTENT You
have got to be unique if you want to be #1.

Next - Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking

Notice the trend here? They do not like to be deceived nor do they like to be
tricked (same thing right)

Next - The use of text that is hidden from the user

If you are writing for the user and not the search engines...why would you
need to hide text? This also includes writing your keywords a bunch of times in
the same or slightly different color then your background. You are doing it to
deceive. They know you are.

Next - Pages that give the search engine different content than what the
end-user sees

This goes right with tricks and schemes. If you want short term rankings real
fast that get banned real fast too.....go for it.

That is all for today. We will continue on in our next posting.

by: 1 Choice 4 Your Store

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