Some of you may remember that last year around this time (almost to the day) I published a 10 step guide here on the Klog which highlighted the process for setting up a Yahoo! Site Explorer account - a tool that provides valuable information about your website and shows just how it interacts with the Yahoo! Search crawler - for Yahoo! Store owners. While in a perfect world this guide would continue to help Yahoo! Store merchants for years to come, it appears that in less then a year my original guide has become slightly outdated. Not a problem though... I will address these changes and publish a newly revised version below.

I guess it doesn't surprise me all that much that this has happened. The Yahoo! Store development team has always put forth a huge effort to continually improve their platform, and to make building and marketing a Yahoo! Store headache-free... I mean why else would their team go through the trouble of taking an already simplified 10-step process and reduce it to a 9-step process.

Without further ado, here is my revised guide on how to setup up Yahoo! Site Explorer with a Yahoo! Store:

Step 1
First things first, open up a browser window, login into your Yahoo! Small Business account, and locate the "Store Control Panel" of your Yahoo! Store account. Click on the "Search Engines" text-link under the "Promote" section near the bottom-left-corner of your screen.

Step 2
Now on the "Promote Your Site on Search Engines" page, scroll down the page and find the "Yahoo! Site Explorer - View your Site's Online Presence" section. Click on the "Launch Yahoo! Site Explorer" text-link. This will automatically open the Yahoo! Site Explorer account in a new browser window.

Step 3
Now in the Yahoo! Site Explorer account, add your website. To do so, enter your website's URL in the specified section at the top of the screen, and click "Add My Site".

Step 4
After clicking "Add My Site" in the previous step, you'll find that your website has been added to Yahoo! Site Explorer and that it now appears in a table below. The next and final step in this process is to "Authenticate" your website. Authenticating a website will allow Yahoo! Site Explorer the ability to share additional information about your website that otherwise wouldn't be shared. To begin the authenticate process, click on the "Authenticate" tab under the "Status" column.

Step 5
Now on the "Authentication" page, you'll find that there are 2 different ways one can authenticate a website... via an HTML upload or by adding a special meta-tag to the homepage. In this guide, we'll be using the meta-tag option, as it is very easy for Yahoo! Store owners to do.

Using your mouse, highlight the meta-tag (it should start with "<" and end with ">"), and copy it (to copy hit "CTRL + C" on your keyboard). DO NOT CLICK "Ready to Authenticate". Instead, leave this page exactly as it is.

Step 6
Switch back over to the previous window where you should still be on the "Promote Your Site on Search Engines" page. Click on the "Done" button at the very top of the page to return back to the "Store Control Panel". Click on the "Store Editor" text-link to edit your Yahoo! Store.

Now in the store editor on your home page, click the "edit" button found on the editor's navigation bar.

Step 7
Now inside the edit screen, find the "head-tags" property and paste the meta-tag that you had copied in step 5 (to paste hit "CTRL + V" on your keyboard) inside its respective box. Should your store not already have a "head-tags" section on this page you'll have to overwrite your variables and include it – then again, you could always place this meta-tag in the "head-tags" section of your variables. When finished, click the "update" button at the very top or bottom of the page.

Step 8
Now back on your home page within the store editor, click the "publish" button found on the editor's navigation bar. Doing so will automatically publish your website as well as the newly added meta-tag needed to verify the authentication of your Yahoo! Site Explorer account.

Step 9
Return to your Yahoo! Site Explorer window where you should still be on the "Authentication" page. Click the "Ready to Authenticate" tab to complete the website authentication process. If all was done properly, you should now read "Your site is pending authentication" near the top-left of the page.

Congratulations! Yahoo! Site Explorer is now set-up. Give it a day or so to verify the authentication, and to retrieve data on your website. Soon you'll have all the information you need to understand how the Yahoo! search engine finds, crawls, reads, and indexes the pages on your website.