So you have a website, or a blog that you want to rank well in search results. One place that you can easily get back links from, build your sites online presence, and get found in search results is Yahoo Answers. If you’re stuck with other SEO building strategies or looking to diversify your back links this is a good place to start.

There are 3 reasons why you want to use Yahoo Answers they are;

When you answer a question you have the option to include a link from your site as a resource. If you provide a good answer people will read it and follow the link to your site. The same can also be done when asking a question. Often many people ask for a review or advice on how to make their site better and include a link to their site in the question.

If your answer is chosen as the best answer it’ll appear first below the question, you can still see all the other answers but yours is in the best position. Questions asked on Yahoo Answers also appear in search results and can be shared on social sites and hold a lot of weight, giving your site some valuable back links while increasing your web presence.

Yahoo Answers uses a point system to determine peoples standing on the site. This also limit’s the amount of questions and answers one can post per day. The higher you rank the more questions you can answer, the more links you can post. Plus if you contribute enough you’ll become a “top contributor” for that category giving your answers even more weight.

It’s pretty straight forward but there are a couple things that you can do to tweak it more to your advantage and squeeze some more out of the site to your benefit

As you progress in rank you have the option to vote for more and more answers to be the best answer to a question. Often what happens is someone will ask a question and forget about it and let either the votes dictate the best answer. Check through the questions you asked previously and looked for any that are in voting. If your answer includes a link to your site vote it up. Chances are it’ll be picked as the best answer giving you not only a best answer and another back link, but more points that will boost your level.

Take a moment before you answer a question to see what kind of answers were posted. Just like when commenting on blogs or websites it pays to go against the grain. For example if there are a bunch of short answers, go into detail. If all the answers are long keep it short and to the point while being helpful. Your goal should be to provide quality, the better answer you give the better chance it has of being picked as the best answer.

I’ve seen this a lot, someone provides a good answer and then throws in their homepages link as the resource. While this is fine to do it can be flagged as spam. It can also annoy people visiting your site who now have to search your site to find the information their looking for. 

Instead provide links to posts you’ve written that provide additional information to the question. From my personnel experience this helps keep visitors on longer and helps boost that pages search results and page rank.

When you post an answer you have the option to have that answer show up your Facebook, Yahoo Updates, and Twitter accounts…do this. Doing so will help bring even more people to your site while building back links form high ranking sites.

In summary Yahoo Answers is another place you can build that all important traffic to your website. Follow their guide lines, don’t be a troll and it can be a valuable resource.