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Crafting Descriptions for Yahoo! Listings By Jill Whalen - November 02, 2000 (From the Rank Write Roundtable Newsletter) ~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~ From: Tina We submitted our site via the Business Express Service and were rejected because our site was down the EXACT day Yahoo looked at it. There was a fiber optic cable cut and our site happened to be one that was routed through it. Needless to say, we appealed and were accepted. The problem is that our description is awful!! Now what do we do??? I felt our description was short enough but they cut out every manufacturer that we carry and just left in the main products i.e.: printers, scanner, terminals. What I would like to know is what the trick is to get a proper description for your Yahoo listing - We do have 30 days to appeal. What aggravates me the most is that someone who does not even know our business decides what description is most important to our business. Why these people cannot just use the description we provide is beyond me unless for some reason they do not want your site to succeed. ANY answers to this description dilemma would be much appreciated Thanks, Tina Hartman www.barcodediscount.com [ Jill's Comment: I emailed Tina for a bit more info so that I could better answer this question. I wanted to know the description that she originally submitted, and the description that she ended up with. Here's what she sent me: Description Submitted: Online bar code products store offering Symbol, Metrologic, Percon, Zebra, Printronix, Eltron, Sato, Datamax, Printek, Welch Allyn scanners, terminals, printers and ribbons Description Yahoo put in: Offers barcode products including scanners, terminals, printers, labels, and more. ] ~~~Jill's Response~~~ This question brings up the extremely important issue of how to properly submit to the human-edited Directories. As fate may have it, my latest article is on that very subject! You can read it at: [ http://www.rankwrite.com/directorysubmit.htm ]. In the article, I stress the importance of submitting your site carefully and correctly from the start. In many cases, once the site is listed, you're often stuck with what you've got. The trickiest part of submitting to Directories is what to use for your description. If it's long (even though it may be within the suggested limits, e.g., for Yahoo!, 25 words), it will surely be rewritten. If you give an editor the slightest reason to modify your description, there's a good chance you'll be sunk. As Tina points out, no editor is going to know your site as well as you do. The only information they have to go by is what you've submitted and the information that they find on your site. This is another reason why it's so very important to have great text right on your main page. It is what your viewers will see, and what Directory editors will use to judge your site. Since the editors don't have the time to seriously comb through your site, your goal is to spoon-feed them the perfect description. If your submitted description also matches up with text that's visible on your main page, that can surely help. Another important thing to note is that your submitted description should have a similar style, length, and use of keywords as the other site descriptions already listed in your given category. Now, looking specifically at what Tina submitted, I do see a few problems. First of all, it's definitely too long. Because of this, it's opened itself up for editing. If you look at the other sites currently in the same category, many of the descriptions are very similar to how the editors changed Tina's description. I did not ask Tina what she submitted for the Title, but if she tried to put anything other than the company or site name, that would also open up the submission for additional scrutiny. There's also a good chance that Yahoo! prefers not to put brand names into site descriptions (although I couldn't find this point anywhere in their FAQs). I did see a few descriptions in Tina's category that had brand names, but I'll betcha that those are older sites that were submitted many years ago. The description they ended up using for this site is really not all that bad, in my opinion. It does list the main product lines. This site could possibly rank high for "barcode scanners," "barcode terminals" and the like. I would have submitted something a bit different myself, to be sure that the exact keyword phrases I wanted to rank high with would be utilized properly. However, what they ultimately came up with appears to accurately describe what this site has to offer. Tina mentioned that without the brand names, her listing is useless. However, when I did a Word Tracker search for the brand names she had used in her original description, they were not searched upon any more than "barcode scanners" for the most part. (And we're only talking about approximately 30 times a day for any of the given terms.) There may not be much that Tina can do now to remedy this situation. If, when she first submitted, she put perhaps 2 of the brand names in the description, it may have gotten in unedited. Now she will have to prove that the description they gave her is somehow inaccurate. You can't appeal because you don't think your description will get your site ranked high. (At least you can't give that as a reason.) You can only appeal the fact that the description is inaccurate or doesn't encompass what you do. If Tina can figure out a polite way to let them know that this description doesn't accurately describe what her company does, and suggests a new one that will, perhaps she'll have a shot. I have had some successful appeals using this method in the past, but I have also had some unsuccessful ones. It is certainly worth a shot. As long as you're nice and polite about it, they shouldn't punish you for appealing. However, I certainly wouldn't fire an angry email at them. No good could ever come of that! Although it may not help Tina much at this point, the bottom line is that if you're not sure about how to submit the perfect description (especially where Yahoo! is concerned), this is one area where you might want to hire a professional. It's definitely a specialized skill and one that is learned through trial and error. Please read the above mentioned article, for more details on this important subject. Jill ~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~ If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting questions, so ask away!