There are roughly 36 million searches every week, with approximately 50% of those searches conducted though search engines, while the remainder are though one search portal: Yahoo.

Creating a Search Strategy for a site means that all the bases have to be covered, and until now, I've been concentrating on the search engines because they are the most difficult to manage. Search Engine specific coding, with all the intricacies involved, is a time consuming task; especially if you, as I strongly recommend, code each page individually for maximum placement results.

But, Yahoo (and the other directories: Open Directory, Look Smart, About, etc.) are animals of a different color. When you submit to these, you are submitting to a human being for review. These "editors" look at the site with the eyes of a user and appropriately judge the site's relevance based on the way a user would look at a site.

Since there are about 10,000 new domains added to the internet every day, a good number are submitted each day. Therefore, the editors have quite a bit of work to do before they can end their day. That means that annoyances like long download times should be avoided at all costs. If users don't appreciate long download times, these people hate them.

Navigation should be a simple matter for the same reason. No one likes to feel like an idiot wondering what to do when they are finished with the page they are on. A navigable site should be a high priority, allowing the user (and the editor) easy access to the important information they are trying to find (and you are trying to provide). Content is King.

When submitting to Yahoo, your site has the opportunity to be listed in 2 categories and it is important to choose those categories with care. If your site has content that is extremely local in scope, it is obviously important to list it as a regional site in order to focus the searcher on the location you are covering. In addition, it will ensure that the site is not lumped in with dozens of other sites, but rather with a relative few that cater to your specific market. Therefore, the likelihood of your site being chosen as a destination in the results is greatly enhanced.

On the other hand, if the site has broad appeal, listing the site in the appropriate categories may place it in a results page that includes lots of other sites. And, since the listings are alphabetical, a site name beginning with the letter 'X' doesn't have a great chance of catching a lot of traffic.

Are there ways of overcoming an alphabetical disadvantage? Well, barring renaming the site, this truly emphasizes the importance of having a comprehensive strategy that includes optimizing the site for all of the major search engines.