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New Prebuilt Custom Design Templates available for Yahoo Stores

We just introduced some new pre built design templates for your Yahoo Store. Now too you can have a custom design without investing a fortune in your store design and missing out on the dollars for the promotion.

Any Yahoo Store Design template like you see on the left, is further modified and changed to suit your products and categories.

There is no loss of functionality of the store and you will be able to add modify delete the items just like before.

All the templates come with the following features:

1. Custom layout using approved HTML and RTML scripting.
2. Custom Header.
3. Custom Left Nav bar. All text links.
4. Third Column for display of important information. Can also be
used for displaying cross-sells
5. Breadcrumbs
6. Item Name or Headlines turned to text.
7. Quantity box and custom add to cart image.
8. Search Engine readiness with meta insertion and robot files.
9. Image pop ups.
10. Integration with any mail list program.
11. Tell A Friend.
12. Image Alt tags for SEO
13. Yahoo! Store Manager Configuration
14. Shipping and Tax Configuration
15. Yahoo Store Training on new templates.

Call us now at 1-888-508-0613 to find out more...

Ashwani Bhasin
Yahoo Store Designer

Your YStore Check List

1. Easy To Read- You want to make it easy for your visitors to read your text. You don't want to use a light colored text like yellow on a white background and you don't want to use dark blue text on a black back- ground.

2. Create A Mood- You want to use the color of your text to create a mood for the reader. If you want to create excitement, use some red text. If you want to create greed, use a some green text. Use colors that would put you in a mood to buy your product.

3. Grab Their Attention- You can grab your readers attention by using headlines. Make the headline more noticeable by using a different colored headline than your ad copy. This offsets the headline and pulls the reader into the rest of your ad copy.

4. Highlight Keywords- You can emphasize phrases and keywords that are important to your readers. For instance, use super, deluxe, fast, low price, free, new, etc. You could use bolding, underlining, italics, color changing, etc.

5. Sizing It Up- You don't want to use text that is too small or to large. You want to use larger text for your headlines and subheadings. You want to use smaller text for your ad copy. If your grandparents can't read it, it's too small.

6. Don't Use All CAPS!- You don't want to use all capital letters in your ad copy. It looks unprofessional and is hard to read. You may want to use all CAPS in your headlines to offset it.

7. Font Properly- You want to use a text font that relates to the product or services your selling. You don't want to use a comic type font when your selling business books.

8. Spacing Out- It's important to use spaces properly when typing your text. You should indent and bullet key benefits your product or service will give the reader. Your headlines, subheadings, sentences and paragraphs should be consistently spaced throughout your web site.

9. I Need Sunglasses- Don't use all bright text colors and backgrounds on your web site. It will make your text hard to read and actually bother your readers' eyes to the point they just decide to leave your site.

10. Check The Readability- It's important to check your spelling and grammar before you publish your yahoo store. When writing an ad copy you're allowed to break some of those grammar rules to get your point across.

Make Yahoo Store Grow With The Times

How do you ensure the continuous flow of sales and other positive aspects that your yahoo store gives you? Go on with your usual distribution and promotion of your print ads. As with these prints, your site should be updated in order to have people coming back for recent information. It would be a waste of time and a disappointment for them to go to your yahoo store to see the latest and get the read the same things that they have read like one or two months ago. If your site is like this, you have just signed an invisible termination of contract of a useful and worthy site.

Update your site from time to time. Give your visitors the latest and not the latest some years back. Having readers read outdated information will not win you any points. There is also a possibility that these people would never try to visit your site again after getting that impression. From the time you started your site, you should have been aware of the responsibility that comes with it. Sites are cheaper than any reading materials that you need to send on a time basis. Think about it, cost-effective and very accessible. Give the readers what they need and update your site.

Put reference section where you can note things like the recent changes you have made in your site. This lets people know that your site is being maintained. Nothing like a good reminder every now and then for people who are too status-conscious.

Remove outdated pages but make them still accessible for those who may need to go back to old information. This information not only becomes little of use also can be confusing. Removing them often would be wiser than having them pile up and taking so much of your site space and making you pay much more. Why continue to confuse and anger the people by giving them this information when you can give them far better things than that?

Check the search engines constantly if your yahoo store is still as accessible as before. Check also if people are finding it easy to search for your site in these engines. There are some search engines that uses meta tags that holds keywords and description of your site for easy access. You could try writing a page that explains your company, what it does; its services and other resources you offer. Different search engines have different preferences in the way your sites should be displayed. There are those who prefer meta tags and those that choose content page.

A site that can change, evolve, and grows is a definite candidate for the kind of site that people keep coming back for more.

"Google kicked out my yahoo store!"

I just finished talking to a client who told me that he had his yahoo store item related keywords among top ten results on google search. He seemed to be pretty concerned about what wrong may have happened. When I browsed on his yahoo store pages, I found many problem areas related to google searchbot. Here are the few of them:

1. Hidden Text: Found two lines underneath the final-text area. Carrying so many store related keywords. For all of you who cant really avoid the hidden text, why dont we use a light grey color for that instead of white?

2. Doorway Pages: 5 of them using the Raw-html type. Linking back to the home page. Carrying no other links. It is always a good idea if you can create a content stories of about 400-500 words on the doorway or special pages which has link to the yahoo store section or item pages instead of just linking to the home page.

3. Javascript: Too Much javascript and css text on the head tags could be one reason. The javascript was about opening a popup page about the store annoucements. Well the function was being called popup. I am not sure if googlebot took this function name too seriously but the javascript iteself must have been. Moving everything in javascript or css into a file whopuld have been a better option.

4. Redirect to the Offer Page: This is a 100% NO-NO for google. Do not have any sneaky meta tag related or javascript redirect to the store. This applies to the doorway pages, landing pages, homepages on the web hosting side of your merchant solution package too.

5. Missing Content: Too little description on the item pages could be one reason.

6. Missing Robots Meta Tag: It is always better to let the googlebot find its way from the path specified by the robots .txt file. You can always add this meta tag in the head-tags variable

< meta name="robots" content="ALL" >
< meta name="robots" content="INDEX,FOLLOW" >

This tells the googlebot or any other search engine spider to look deeper into the linked pages on that particular page.

7. No Headline Text: Google does a great job in reading headlines. All the text which appears in h1, h2, h3 or h4 tags looks interesting to google crawler and is a must tool for google SEO


Btw, Ever wondered how a page looks to the spider?

Try this free service called Poodle Predictor at http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go.

This tells you how your site appears to the googlebot.

So, we need to be extra careful not to spam google when it comes to seo. Some of the listed things above may have no impact to other search engines like yahoo or msn, but a balanced approach is what we need when it comes to Search Engine Optimization

Ashwani Bhasin
1-703-880-6510

Top 5 RTML Templates for Search Engine Optimization of your Yahoo Store

I have been receieving calls and emails about the Yahoo Store SEO. Some people have a notion that the yahoo stores cant be optimized. They say that they contacted xyz search engine optimization company and have been told that it is very hard to optimize yahoo stores.

Well my dear fellow SEO Experts, it is nothing like "hard-to-do-yahoo-store-seo". There are many rtml templates which can improve your yahoo store optimization. These can be easily installed on yahoo stores, old or new. On merchant solutions or Legacy (old) platform.

Let me suggest the TOP 5 SEO related RTML Templates - Your Yahoo Store Must-Haves:

1. Breadcrumbs Navigation
Put a trail of weblinks on your item pages. Like Home>>Apparel>>Jeans>>Nautica Jeans

This is a good tool for the search engine robots and spiders as it carries the links to the parent categories too. So easy for them to crawl them. Useful for customer navigation.

2. Text Based Side Navigation Bar
Default Yahoo Store template shows the navigational links on the side bar as image map which is not good for the search engines like google as it can not read them. When we put in the RTML template for this modification, all the section names which appear on the side bar will be changed to text links. This will help in search engine optimization as also for faster page loads.

3. Turn Page name, Item Name or Headline from Image to Text
Put your mouse pointer on the item name on your yahoo store item page. Right click and it will say image properties or save image as..

This shows that the name or headline is being rendered as an image. A no-no for google, yahoo web search or msn etc. Their text based crawlers are unable to read it.
This rtml template will turn the item name or headline into text. Makes it easier for google types to read it. Also avoids the lengthy item names to go out of screen boundaries. :)

4. Dynamic Title Tags on Yahoo Store Item & Section Pages
Adding this RTML template will make your item or section page templates unique. If your item page name is 24" waist Blue Jean, by default the title shows as 24" waist Blue Jean. With the RTML improvement, it will show like this 24" waist Blue Jean - Nautica Jeans. This increases your keyword density and makes it more relevant. You can also have a fixed set of keywords to appear on all the titles.

5. Dynamic Description and Keyword Metatags
By Default, you can put a fixed set of keywords on global variables. Now this is not a good way. Each page is unique and so should be the keywords going with it. When we install this rtml template, it will pick the keywords from the item itself. This is dynamic and no input is required from you.
Same goes with the description. If you have longer item caption text, it will truncate it to show only the desired length.



More SEO related templates are available at YStoreclick's Yahoo Store SEO RTML Templates Section

Happy 2005 to you all!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year 2005

Everybody at Y!Storeclick.com, Yahoo Store Designer extend our warmest wishes for a joyous holiday and a happy New Year. May this coming year be filled with health, happiness, joy, and contentment.

Submit your site to Yahoo Search. FREE!

Yahoo! recently introduced free yahoo search submission service to its web search after a gap of about 3 years. You no longer have to wait and wait to get the yahoo crawler to pick your site's content.

The page can be accessed from:
http://submit.search.yahoo.com