Yahoo! Review: Promotional Tools (4 stars)
Almost Everything You Need to Do Your Own Website Promotion
What the Yahoo Store Editor site lacks in design and features, it makes up for by getting you found on the Web. Yahoo provides lots of resources to help you run your own promotional campaign to help bring traffic to your site.
Yahoo’s Mission for Site Submission
Predictably, Yahoo offers auto-submission to Yahoo Search for Merchant Solutions websites. They even help you out further by providing links to Google and MSN’s site submission pages so that all your bases are covered.
“News and Resources” Section Lets You Do Your Promotional Homework
From “Merchant Solutions” home page (the page you start at when you log in), you can access the “News and Resources” page. On this page there are loads of articles on all kinds of topics related to promotion, including design, search engines, email marketing, etc. Some of these articles are provided by Yahoo, others come from prominent business sites like Entrepreneur.com and AllBusiness.com.
We read a few articles and they are pretty well written and offer useful info for the would-be website promoter.
Plenty of Info to Get Your Promotional Campaign Started
Missing Meta Tags
Store Editor allows you to enter keywords into your website's Meta tags, making it easier for search engines to understand and index your website. It's easy enough to use, but you have to dig a bit to find the Meta tag editor. It's on the "Variables" page of the editor.
The only thing it’s really missing is the option to enter info into the title and description meta tags, which are important for helping people understand your site’s contents when they find you through a search engine.
Of course, if you know HTML you can enter in all this info, but if you’re restricted to using the Store Editor to enter info, you’re outta luck.
Free Credits from Yahoo’s Partner Companies
When you sign up for Merchant Solutions, you get free credits for a number of useful promotional products.
Courtesy of Google and Yahoo, you get free credits for each company’s sponsored search results programs, Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. These programs automatically put up a text ad that you create when people search for the keywords that you specify. You pay a pre-designated amount whenever someone clicks on your ad.
In addition, there are also free credits for Submitnet (a search marketing management system), Campaigner by GOT (an email marketing service), plus credits for a few shopping listing sites, including Shopping.com and Nextag.
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