2 days back , i received a call from a girl , who introduced herself as from Yahoo India. Almost before i slapped down the phone, as I was almost fed up with tele-callers from various credit card companies and financial institutions, i heard the name Yahoo luckily . I have never worked in the tele-calling department / industry, but most of the tele callers i have faced never do any level of necessary homework . I understand that most times that is not a possibility, for all i know, these people may get paid by the number of persons called up and not by the numbers of accounts bagged . But in my opinion it would go a long way making the sale …. at least to know the business of the person they call up.
In this case, the girl did not even know that I am into web development , even though she knew the name of my company’s website , which is “websys.co.in” . Nevertheless , she was quite bent on explaining me all about PPC , Yahoo and similar topics, which i did not have any interest of hearing. I was already ready to take the account, as I was also reading about the same topic on Sitepoint’s Search Engine Marketing Kit . Anyway , finally she gave the phone to her senior .
Her senior was little more to the point , and was able to help me sign up quite quickly and activate my account , setup a first campaign , add keyword to it etc. I now have 2 ads running . but here comes the not-so-happy part .
Yahoo Search Marketing India , probably because it is newer than its parent , left much to be desired. It does not even have half the options I was reading about , which is obvious from just by looking at the FAQ , which I should have earlier – feature wise, the “Senior” person who was helping me was not even fully knowledgeable about his own product . I had asked him ” Ok, thanks so I now have my Ad running on your network but what is my reach … is it on Yahoo or Yahoo India ” and the guy went like ” Don’t worry , your ad is now running on Yahoo.com, MSN.com , and various of our other partners because you used “Content Match , Advance Match” etc . But i was little uncertain , so I asked him to run a search for web hosting , on both Search.Yahoo.co.in and Search.Yahoo.com, which demonstrated totally different ads on the sponsored listings box. So the guy then requested to call me back with more info , which he did within 15 minutes and confirmed my fear . Well , I wont say fear as I didn’t really expect to pay a 0.50 p CPC and get my ad on top at Yahoo.com or MSN.com lol . But , just so you know , Yahoo Search Marketing does have partners like MSN , but it is Msn.co.in and similar .
When the person was also demonstrating me the Keyword Selector Tool i had queried whether i can save my current searches – online or download for analysis / future – i also had a extremely difficult time explaining what i was trying to do , and “WHY – i would need to do that ”
Nevertheless, i am currently receiving daily reports of my first paid campaign , at a very low cost and I was able to learn / gather / answer some of my own queries, so overall i would say i am somewhat satisfied . What remains to be seen is what this experimental project goes , and then i will venture to bigger pond of international Search Engine Marketing .

DMOZ is the original Open Directory Project, one of the oldest and most reputed directories on the internet. Along with BOTW , Yahoo Directory and Business.com , if anyone serious in getting exposure and enlistment in their topic – it is the directory to be in . Numerous seo tools use a listing in DMOZ as a criteria for evaluating a website’s value. Since it’s inception as an Open Directory Project – meaning contribution can be provided by anyone with an interest and time and energy to devote, DMOZ has kept on enlarging and diversifying into various countries and languages .

However in the past – because of its basic slowness and often inactivity among volunteers , it has become the point of anger for numerous webmasters . People often read about horror stories of not getting listed for months and years , people also hear stories about corrupt DMOZ editors – who allegedly or maybe even truly taken bribes for enlisting websites. DMOZ , like WIkipedia , is not operated by a single group of people ( as far as my knowledge goes) , rather from different ends of the Internet – thus demystifying all the theories and stories might not be possible , but to come somewhat closer to its active audience – they had opened a Public Forum . It did serve some purpose and i believe several actual rules and guidelines are better explained in there , as I was just visiting it . But since past 2 years they closed down the DMOZ Site Submission Status forum , which once again angered many a people . On visiting it today I found out that AOL staff governing DMOZ has initiated a Official DMOZ Blog . Undoubtedly this is another step in having a more public face for the ODP , keeping with the current day trends for every well known websites as well. But it remains to be seen if this will become another bloodbath between the Editors and the Webmasters and also die a unnatural death like the forum. Be as it may , I am still planning to subscribe to it’s RSS feed to stay updated .