If you publish an RSS newsfeed, you are probably familiar with the Newsfeed Feed Directory on My Yahoo.

I'm assuming you already know about how users of My Yahoo are able to add RSS & Atom newsfeeds to their customized My Yahoo page. This article deals with the process of how people find newsfeeds to add to their My Yahoo page, and what you can do make your newsfeed more visible.

Adding Your Newsfeed to My Yahoo

There is no "Submit Feed" tool on My Yahoo. The only way to get your newsfeed added to My Yahoo's feed directory is when someone, including yourself, adds the newsfeed to their customized My Yahoo page. Once this is done, My Yahoo adds the newsfeed to its newsfeed directory, and becomes available for other people to find.

This means you will need to get yourself an account with My Yahoo. Go to http://my.yahoo.com/ and then click on "Sign Up". It's free.

Once you're signed up, visit your My Yahoo page, by going to: http://my.yahoo.com/ again. Towards the upper-left hand side of the page, you should see link labeled, "Add Content". Click it.

This should take you to a page with a search form. Notice towards the right of the Find Button is a link labeled, "Add RSS by URL". Click that.

Now enter the URL of your RSS or Atom newsfeed. My Yahoo will walk you through the process from there. When finished, your My Yahoo page will display the latest headlines from your newsfeed. Congratulations! Your newsfeed has been added to My Yahoo.

Searching For Newsfeeds

Now, let's pretend you're someone who doesn't publish any newsfeeds at all. You're just a casual web user interested in adding some newsfeeds to your customized My Yahoo page.

Ok, go to your My Yahoo homepage at: http://my.yahoo.com/

Click on "Add Content". Now, enter the word "motorcycles" into the search form.

You see search results listing out over a hundred different newsfeeds focusing on the subject of motorcycles. Each listing has a button allowing you to add that newsfeed to your customized My Yahoo page.

Click on one of the newsfeeds to see five latest headlines in that newsfeed. Don't click on the "Add Button", but click the actual newsfeed title to see the headlines.

As a casual web user, the chances are that you're going to evaluate the top one or two newsfeeds to see what's there, and then scan down the rest of the results to find something more specific to your tastes.

But as a newsfeed publisher, how do you get your newsfeed to display at the top of these result?

Optimizing Your Newsfeed for My Yahoo

It appears that every newsfeed that displays on a list of search results has the keyword either in the Newsfeed Title or the Newsfeed Description. Having the keyword in both the title and the description does not seem to provide any additional ranking.

The actual ranking of each result appears to be based on the number of subscriptions, and the frequency of publication. Number of subscriptions means how many people have added your feed to their My Yahoo page, this perhaps determines popularity. The more frequently you update your feed, determines its freshness. Keep in mind this statement is not based on fact, but based on my observations of monitoring several newsfeeds that I publish.

Make sure the top two or three keywords are found either in the title or description of your newsfeed. But do not stuff several keywords! What you want is a title and description that looks appealing and enticing, as opposed to a hodge-podge of keywords.

The trick then is to get several people to add your newsfeed to their My Yahoo page. The more often they do this, the more traffic you will receive from My Yahoo.

My Yahoo gives newsfeed publishers a little chicklet button that you can put on your website. When a visitor clicks this button, it takes them straight to the process of adding your newsfeed to their My Yahoo page.

So, what you want to do is display this button on everypage of your website or weblog. Place the button in a place where everyone will see it, preferably above the fold. If you have a mailing list, send out a mailing promoting your newsfeed and include the button in the mailing.

Update Your Newsfeed Regularly

Now that your newsfeed is added to My Yahoo and is optimized for rankings, the best thing you can do at this point is keep your newsfeed fresh with new content.

My Yahoo sends a robot to your newsfeed every so often to see if any new content has been added. How often it visits your newsfeed is dependent on how often you update it. A robot can visit your feed as frequently as each hour. I would suggest at writing at least one item each day.

The reason for this is that My Yahoo has a feature built in where if your newsfeed does not have any content newer than 3 days old, users of My Yahoo will not see your headlines on their My Yahoo page. In order to keep your headlines displaying on people's My Yahoo page, you have to keep writing new content. But that shouldn't be a problem now, should it?