Instructions for using Yahoo! Answers (handwash, do not iron)

Yahoo! Answers SEO guide

Yahoo! Answers (hereinafter y! A) is a social network for people who have different questions and want to quickly get answers to them. This is a unique set of thematic forums for which the rules of questions and answers are one. Y! A is a powerful optimization tool in the hands of SEO optimizers. Both beginners and advanced.





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The target audience

Based on the experience and analysis of the questions, you can display the following data about the audience of the service y! A:

1. 70% - North America
2. 10% - Australia and Oceania
3. 10% - United Kingdom
4. 10% - the rest of the country.

These questions are asked only by users from North America, Australia and the UK. Most users from other countries use the service as spam sites.

Scoring system in the service y! A

Each user responding to questions receives a certain amount of reputation points. Reputation points are used to raise the level, and, accordingly, the degree of trust in the user. Only users of the second level and above can leave an active link in the body of their comments.

• 1 point is given for visiting the service once a day.
• 2 points are given for answering a question.
• 10 points are given if your answer was recognized as the best (Best Answer)
• 1 point is given each time you get +1 from other users for your answer.

The most tasty morsel from this list is Best Answer . We will try to receive them. The rest are not so important, because you should not go to the site every day or try to answer each question.



There are two ways to get the Best Answer:

• Asker (the questioner) chooses the best answer from all provided.
• Service Y! A chooses the best answer. The best is the one that got the most +1.

Users with a level of 2 or more are more trustworthy than users with the first level. That is, you need to type the second level. The higher your reputation - the more your words will be listened to. And, for example, if you advise the site vashsite.com - users will visit it.

Types of questions

All questions in the service are structured by category. But there are more popular categories, and there are less popular. There are three types of questions that are popular for quite a while. And so, what questions should be paid attention to, and which ones should be avoided?

• 70% are schoolchildren who ask homework related questions. The least grateful users are registered on the service for one or two questions. Very rarely put “Best Answer”. Example student question: A typical student question
• 15% - users interested in computer topics. Very advanced in terms of use y! A. High chance (45%) to get “Best Answer”. An example of a question on computer topics: A typical question for users of the second type
• 15% are regular users of the service y! A. Maximum chance to get a “Best Answer” for a content-filled answer. Subject matter depends a little more than completely on education. All questions that did not fall under the categories above can be easily entered into this section. An example of such a question:
  
  A typical question of a regular user

Getting Started

In order to leave comments, we need to create an account on the service y! A. How to do this will not be described. I want to draw attention to some of the necessary points:

• Select an avatar. Avatar provides more user confidence than a simple exclamation mark, which is the default.
• Fill out information about yourself. Probably, you will not want to fill in all contact details, but there should be a minimum set of such data. Share your information with users and they will share their trust in you.
• Connect your y! A account to the social network Yahoo! In this case, you are guaranteed confidence from the administration of the service.

Below is a comparative graph, where the number of Best Answers is set vertically, and weeks are set horizontally. It is considered that 30 replies were posted per week.

Graph comparing the effectiveness of leaving responses to different types of users

Conclusion : you must still fill out information about yourself. You must look natural. So that no one even suspects that you are some kind of spammer.

Answers The first steps

So, we proceed to the answers. There are some written and unwritten rules for placing answers in the service of y! A.

• No need to leave a link to the promoted resource in each answer! The results are very clearly shown in the graph below.
• A negative impact on the reputation of the presence of two or more exclamation marks, the question at the end (???? !!!!!!). An exception - (!?). This is not as bad as links, but it also has a negative effect. In almost 60% of responses with such comments, you will get -1 in reputation
• Do not write all words in capital letters. Capital letters for the first words in the sentence and your own names!
• It is forbidden to use profanity, calls for racism and violence, trolling.

Remember - answers that do not benefit the questioner will not benefit you either. Registration of the answer falls on your shoulders, but should be clearly structured:

• A greeting is possible if the user in question greeted you;
• Preamble - often information about the experience that helped you deal with a similar situation;
• Actually the answer;
• Wishing to find out the problem as soon as possible;
• Links to sites where information was drawn from /

An example of an ideal response structure, albeit a bit long. As the saying goes, you can't throw the words out of the song:



An example of the perfect answer.

Answers Equipment

These were superficial advice on posting answers, then we will delve into the technique of posting answers that will be useful to users and lead to a quick set of reputation.

First of all - remember that the site you are promoting has a certain theme. And you, as a representative of this site, should occupy an appropriate niche in the category available on the service. You should try to stick to one category and be known as a specialist in this field. After all, it is known that a surgeon cannot give competent advice in the field of microeconomics of an enterprise in the context of a global crisis.



The answer should not be limited to just the word “Yes \ No”. The answer should be the result of an analysis designed for this question. For example the question

To such a question, to be acknowledged by the questioner in the form

“Best Answer” requires more than just the answer Yes, it is or No, it's not.

Below is a screenshot with the answers to this question.



As you can see, all three responses received negative feedback from users. An example of the correct answer, which will bring (and brought) “Best Answer” below



A little research question with the help of search engines is paying off. It is necessary to at least superficially analyze the situation and explain it in such a format that the user does not just get an answer, but get a hint of how to get to that answer. As can be seen from the above answer, there is no direct answer - Yes, or No. Let the user think of the answer himself. A little psychology is all that is needed.



An example of another question and an analyzed answer that brought “Best Answer”

• The answer in no case should contain aggression! Sometimes users are, to put it mildly, not too knowledgeable in some matters. Your reaction can not be aggressive or offensive. Your task is to clearly explain to the user what he is interested in.
• If possible, try to indicate the source of your response. The site administration loves when someone quotes significant sources. And in one of ten to twelve cases, insert a link to your resource. Remember: you are a specialist in this field and an employee of a certain company. You, by helping others, indicate which company you are from.
• The answer should not be convoluted and long. Almost always, you can limit yourself to three sentences. No need to write scientific treatises, people will just too lazy to read. You need to learn to squeeze all your thoughts into the minimum number of characters. Brevity - c-ra tal-ta. For example :

As you can see, the minimum of words is the maximum of meaning. Below is an example of an answer to the same question:

The answer received +2 reputation, but because it is long - not the best one.



It is also worth considering getting the Best Answer depending on the speed of the answer. Sometimes the first answers really do have a better chance of getting the best answer.



Partly yes, but this cannot be considered as a rule. We give a diagram of the answers:

Diagram of the ratio of the speed of response to its effectiveness



Annotation : 100 first answers and 100 subsequent (not first) answers were placed in various questions. As can be seen from the diagram, the first answers received Best Answer in 43% of cases, and subsequent answers in 67% of cases. Therefore, we can conclude that there is no need to hurry. In this case, quality is important and not speed (and quantity).



It was also checked that Best Answer for the first answers is put only by users of the first type (see “Disposable users” below). It is logical that a person went to the site, asked a question, received the first correct answer and left. He is not interested in other opinions. But other types of users who ask questions, wait for other thoughts on this issue, because users - “ordinary people” are waiting for more than one answer, and then choose the best from them.

Sociality

Y! A - is, first of all, a social network. And this should not be forgotten. To learn how to use its sociality for their own purposes, read below.

• You need to create accounts in most social networks Yahoo! My Yahoo! and in Del.ichio.us.
• Save your answers with the Save button.
  
  
  
  
  
  We are especially interested in the ability to save the answer in My Yahoo! By saving your response with a link, it will be available and visible on My Yahoo! Further, on a chain, from the service My Yahoo! you can subscribe to Facebook, and more and more users will see your correct answer.
• Get dating inside the Yahoo! Answers network. Internet users from North America are very sociable. If you make friends with such comrades, they will follow your answers and put you +1 at any suitable opportunity. They can also - and in 50% of cases will - follow your answers using My Yahoo! which in turn also increases the weight of your links and comments. You can add a user as a friend by visiting his profile and clicking the following button:
  
  After clicking this button, the user will receive a notification that you have added it to your contacts. If he remembers your answers, and they helped him, he will add you too.
• Complain about messages that do not fall under the policy of communication on the service Y! A. Messages that you can complain about are described in detail in the service itself, we will not dwell on them. The main thing is that we earn trust from the administration. If the complaint helped to find the message with inappropriate meaning, your account will secretly be trusted, and will have a slightly higher degree of trust in the future. But this effect has the opposite effect - if the complaint was not detected by a malicious message, you will lose trust. A complaint button is available under each question:
• Try to keep abreast of all the events that concern the minds of users of Y! A- Be it the release of a new game or a change in the look of the YouTube site. If you are aware of the changes - you are competent to respond. Competence in the response is respect from users. Innovations appear every two or three days. And they can be traced with the help of Y! A. People do not know anything about the new, but you are ready to help them and it is available for them to tell about this very “new”.

Search by questions

Use the search function to find the questions and answers most relevant to your topic. Questions are needed in order to answer them, and the answers are needed in order to learn yourself. From many answers, you can gather information that may be useful later. We are interested in Advanced Search: With it, we can specify a lot of criteria that will be searched.

For example :

We need to find questions on web hosting. We need the question to be open and geographically localized in the USA. To do this, we enter in the keywords field the phrase “web hosting”.



As can be seen from the screenshot, you can specify some additional clarifications for the request. This is very useful for a specific search.



In Keyword match in we select “Questions”. Thus, we will search only for questions. In the Location, select “USA questions only”. Category you can leave “All categories”, because users often place questions in the wrong categories, and choosing a certain type of category can miss a good question. The remaining fields can be left as they are, there are no weighty factors in them to search in this situation.





And one more pleasant surprise is waiting for us below - the ability to save your search settings and send an e-mail notification every time they ask a question that matches your criteria.





By setting up the search in this way, we can get about 30 questions on “Web Hosting” per day.

Yahoo! Answers users

The first type is “Disposable” people. People who register with the service to ask a one-time question and get an answer to it. Y! A is not the only place where these users post responses. Also actively use local forums. Approximately 63% of the total audience. (Of the 2,000 questions, 1,300 were asked by such people). Often put real names as nicknames. In rare cases their rating will be higher than the standard. Spend on the service 1 hour per week.



An example of a user of the first type:



Jack_Dorris



On the service Y! A avatar does not have. An avatar is the default image in the form of an exclamation mark. 23 years old. American. Student, or schoolboy. Not familiar with search engines. Questions in Y! A never answer.



100 questions were asked by such users. 65 of them concerned with homework, 15 problems with computer equipment, 5 were about health and 15 were related to other topics. Based on the analysis, you can display the following diagram:



Diagram describing typical questions of users of the first type



It rarely puts the “Best Answer”, because often finds the answer from another source, and does not return to the service Y! A.



The second type is the regular users of Y! A. These are people who like to help others, although they are not sure of their rightness. This type of people is chasing reputation. As an avatar put pictures from the publicly available collection of Yahoo! .. Try to answer all the questions in a row, while not having information about the issue. Approximately 31% of all users make up (out of 2000 questions viewed, 600 were asked by these very people). They often ask questions and just as often answer questions from others. As a nickname is used rarely.



This type of user:

Whirledpeas12.



Aussie or british. 25 years. A sign with the Internet and can use search engines for answers. Based on the questions, we can assume that most of these users are housewives. Spends on the service from 15 hours a week.



After analyzing 100 questions of such people, their main questions can be grouped: 30% of questions about music, 23% of questions about cinema, 20% of questions about games, 12% of questions about seasonal holidays (questions about Christmas, St. Patrick's Day, New Year , etc). 10% of questions about sports and 5% of questions about help with computers.



Diagram describing typical questions of users of the second type



People of the second type are interested in computers, have a good understanding of the Internet and computer hardware. Quite often put “Best Answer”.



The third type is Yahoo! Answers guru. People who have spent on the service for more than 3 years. A distinctive feature is the signature of the Top Contributor under the avatar. People of this type of questions are asked extremely rarely. But very often they answer. 6% of the audience (out of 2000, only 100 people of this type were viewed)



An example of such a user:

Cubbi



30-45 years. American or Englishman. Formed, has a PhD degree. A specialist in programming and design, a web developer. Confident knowledge of internet marketing. Specialist general profile. Spends at the service 6 hours a week. Questions on the service Y! A does not ask.





The ratio of user types described above.





Comparison of users Y! A on criteria that interest us.



Legend:

• Disposable - Ask few questions (1-2 per day) from one account, practically do not put Best Answer (2%), spend very little time on the service (1 hour);
• Frequently - Ask a lot of questions (13 per day), a very high chance of getting the Best Answer for a meaningful answer (80%), spend a lot of time on the service (5-6 hours);
• Guru - Virtually no questions asked (1 per day), you can get the Best Answer only for a competent answer, which will provide a deep analysis of the problem. Spend a lot of time on the service (2 hours a day).

Translated from English, source: webhostinggeeks.com

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