What exactly IS Yahoo! Paid Inclusion?

[luckyluc]

A friend of mine who runs the group that runs the SEM for his company was touting Yahoo! Paid Inclusion (YPI) claiming that it was the reason he was at the top of the rankings for certain terms.

Seeing how his site wasn't very well optimized in a field of content with a lot of competition, it got me wondering about YPI.

Maybe YPI is not exactly what I thought it was. What exactly is YPI (in the most brief of summaries) and what are the pros/cons?

Is YPI worth it?

[Chris Boggs]

Yahoo! calls it Search Submit. http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/index.php

In short, SS (or Paid Inclusion as many SEMs still refer to it as) it is a way to pay per click within the Yahoo! organic results. The costs are set per industry, and there is no guarantee of appearing on the top page. However, you can design a very friendly Title, Description (you can even add extra links) and page which will be considered along with the rest of the "normal" returns for ranking. When done properly, this can yield excellent results.

(side note [and not to try and be "salesy" because that is not my purpose here] we have developed an outstanding software to support this process, which can also be used for other feeds management purposes, called SEOdirect. If you plan on running lots of PI or other feeds, it is a wise investment to create such software. be advised it wont happen overnight though ;) )

[caugas]

I have had great sucess with YSSP. Believe it or not, I have added an incremental 40 - 50k per month to my online campaigns via YSSP. This may not seem like alot to many, but it is good for our sized business and market.

I have actually outsourced all data feed marketing to a vendor. But, more importantly, I made sure that pages I submitted to the vendor were SEO optimized, I also supplied the vendor with a long list of dense keywords that work for our company. I feel with my optimization, and my vendors expertise were can grow this program even more significantly.Maybe an additional 20% more sales.

Additionally, as Chris Boggs mentioned it does not guarentee an advertiser top position for all terms or pages, but it can truly give an advertiser and egde, especially if an advertiser does not rank well in Yahoo, for me, Yahoo and Google rank much differently, and I admit I optimize my pages for Google, not Yahoo.

I need ot add, that the Yahoo directory does not favor my SEO as much as the Google search engine, so in Yahoo, I need all the help I can get, and YSSP deliverys clicks and sales at a low cost, because our site and terms convert so well. I hope this gives you an idea of how YSSP performs for me.

Caugas