With Christmas just around the corner, consumers are ready to get some serious shopping on the go. Finlay Clark, senior bigmouthmedia retail strategist suggests "that some businesses generate 60% of their annual revenue within the 8 week Christmas period", making Christmas a peak time for retail, and possibly travel, websites.Throughout the year, websites go head to head trying to capture as much traffic as possible organically - and it isn't any different come the festive period. One very effective way to enhance your traffic, Click Through Rates (CTR) and client retention is by utilising Yahoo! Search Monkey. Yahoo! Search Monkey is a very powerful tool that allows website owners to use structured data to enhance Yahoo!'s search results.
Let's take a look at two search results; ask yourself this question, which one would you, be more inclined to click on?
The second one, right? That's the enhanced Yahoo! Search Monkey result. By extracting some of the structured product data from a website, you can develop the Yahoo! Search Monkey application in the way demonstrated by the second result. And by doing so, you could find yourself with a massive head start over any competitor at the Christmas period.
So how do I make one?
Developing a Yahoo! Search Monkey application can be an easy or complex task, depending on your requirements. The most common ways to enable you to monkey your results, is by using one of the following:
- Microformats - Tiny bits of code you add to your webpages source code
- eRDF/RDFa Markup - Same as above.
- DataRSS - Similar to RSS feeds.
So, basically, you can either create a specifically formatted feed, or add structured code to your webpage. Either option is fairly straight forward for the average website owner. After you have your method, it is the up to you to customise and alter your results using Yahoo!'s tools.
Yahoo! Search Monkey doesn't only apply to retail, it can apply to finance, travel, non-profit, social sites as well as a variety of other verticals. If you have some form of structured content on your website, then it can utilised by Yahoo! Search Monkey - why not see what a little tinkering could do for your website?
