Yahoo has recently launched a new service called “Yahoo Search Submit Express”. This program has a little SEO, a little pay per inclusion and a little pay per click, all rolled into one. Essentially you pay a fee of $49 for the first URL, and $29 or $10 for each additional one, and the Yahoo team reviews your URL with in 48 hours. They keep coming back every 48 hours to see if the content has been refreshed. That is the PPI component. When your link is clicked on you pay a flat fee of $0.30 cents. That is the PPC component. Keyword rich titles, content, alt tags, and the link all come into play as well as off site factors such as inbound links. Traditional SEO methods will still help your site rise higher in the SERPs, but having budget in your account should in and of itself help you attain higher rankings than you would be able to without the program.

We at Rock Coast Media conducted a test with one of our URLs that placed highly for some terms but not top billing. Over the course of one week, the time it took to extinguish our $50 test budget we saw a ranking improvement in 25% of our keywords. This by no means is a conclusive test, and clearly is not a large enough sample to indicate the over-riding affect of this program in the long run, but at least for now, we know for a fairly low PPC rate and some solid SEO practices there is just another tool to increase your rankings in Yahoo. This information should have the caveat attached that in no way did we see any shift in Google, Ask, AOL, or MSN as a result of the program. Thus only 28% or so of the searches conducted on the internet for our key terms were impacted.