Find the Question to your Yahoo Answers!

Posted by Martin81Vette

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Have you considered using Yahoo Answers to try and drive some traffic to your website / blog? Yahoo Answers has become a very popular network for knowledge thirsty question askers and knowledge soaked answer-meisters, and they are all potential visitors for your site. This article aims to provide a detailed look at some tips / tricks for becoming the glowing Yahoo Answers guru you've always wanted to be!

I was inspired back in January by Nathan Libbeys excellent blog post about generating traffic using Yahoo Answers. After reading Nathan's post I registered with Yahoo Answers and started answering questions, mainly in the environment category, and I quickly became semi-obsessed with "Yahanswering" (Sounds Swedish!).

Now the key to using Yahoo Answers is to actually provide some meaningful answers. Yahoo awards points for answering questions and you get a bunch of points if someone picks your answer as the best;

• Answer a question = 2 points
• Log in to Yahoo! Answers Once daily = 1 point
• Vote for an answer = 1 point
• Get voted as "Best Answer" = 10 points

You get 100 points just for registering but the holy grail of Yahanswering is to reach 250 points, at that point you can actually include live links in your answers!

OK, we can assume you have registered, answered with some great answers and reached 250 points, let's explore a few ways to improve your chances of getting those prized "Best Answers" and boost your site traffic at the same time.

A great way to improve your climb up the Yahoo Answers leader board is to take a look at your site and find a great answer. Have you written an article or a blog post which was super informative, educational and unique? Chances are that if your article provides a great answer to a common problem then there will be some unanswered questions to match it!

Yahoo Answers has an "Advanced Search" feature which allows a question slaying web ninja to find suitable questions which will be a perfect match for his/her awesome answer;

For example, my site has a great article about setting up a tumbling composter and there might be throngs of people on Yahoo Answers desperate to learn more about my tumbling composter!

This is where we can make the Advanced Search feature really work for us, for this example I have chose the keyword "compost" along with any one of the following "tumbler,tumbling,rotating,composting,bin";

You will also notice that I have selected to search only for a Keyword match in "Questions" and the Question Status of "Open Questions".

The all important final stage is to save this advanced search so that you can easily run it every time you log in to Yahoo Answers;

And there you have it, a repeatable and highly focused search that will link you to people desperate to find the answers you already possess!

In my above example the results yielded a find straight away;

I can clearly see that "Donna" needs to read my awesome article about setting up a tumbler composter and I can now click on here question and provide that answer.

I wrote my reply to Donna and can now sit back with fingers crossed and hope that I get that elusive 10 points for a "Best Answer"

Using techniques such as the saved Advanced Searches have built my Yahoo Answers portfolio into a veritable link farm. I have enjoyed the challenge of answering peoples questions and it's very rewarding to get that 10 point Best Answer from a happy question asker.

I have tracked my traffic direct from Yahoo Answers this year and it isn't huge but it's well worth the effort;

As you can see from my stats I've recently taken a break from Yahanswering, mainly to focus on writing articles like this one, but I plan to get my answering hat back on soon and keep climbing my way up that Yahoo Answers leaderboard.

So there you have it, you now have the tools and the knowledge to venture forth and become a Yahoo Answer grand master, let me know your experiences using the Advanced Search features and whether you have seen any spikes in traffic from some crafty Yahanswering!

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