Yahoo started offering free websites to businesses in late April. However, calling them web sites could be a bit inacurate. In this article Mike McEwan checks out the service briefly and explains how useful these listing are and how they stack up to other offers.
Seeing that Yahoo doesn’t even list this free offer with their web hosting options for small businesses, which actually start from $11.95/month, shows that this Yahoo promotion may be something slightly different. Yahoo calls these offers Yahoo! Local Listings. It seems geared more toward expanding Yahoo! Local’s search results and relevance than providing a strong online presence for a small business. This isn’t necessarily a problem for businesses with low demands for their web site. However, if you are going to Yahoo’s free services looking for a robust website, you will be disappointed.
For companies with no website yet, this is a free form of promotion with nothing to lose but the few minutes it takes to fill out Yahoo’s form pages. The site’s creation forms will ask for all the business contact information.
Then it will get into hours of operation, payment methods accepted, and a few additional things like year established, languages spoken, brand names carried, and products offered. After plugging in this information, you’re mostly done.
The page then shows you Yahoo! Local listings already in their database that resemble the business you just entered. If you find that your business is already in the directory for some reason (perhaps because it is included in online yellow pages and Yahoo lifted it from them) you can modify that entry or else start a new one if it isn’t there yet. Then Yahoo will have you sort the listing into some preset categories they have designated, preview it, and submit it.
After this is complete, Yahoo will let you chose between a free or paid website, and then it will assist in creating a webpage using more forms and templates. There isn’t much freedom, but it looks like it’s made for people who may not have the time or money to bother with something more detailed or elaborate.
Search Engine News 
/ 34 
