Submitting
to search engines was up today mostly free, but many people expect to
pay for being included, so this is changing day by day.
Now some
search engines and directories think that if you want to be included
in their listings, you must pay for it!
Does this
mean that they will end up with free submissions? Not necessary.
Search
engines need to deliver a good service if they want to be visited. If
you design a site that has a very good content, people will want to
know about it, and search engines will want to have you on their list.
Even if you don't pay a cent per listing!
And if
Search engines become too commercialized, people will end up going somewhere
else.
A customer
wants to find places that deliver good content about the keyword he's
looking for, and won't be happy to find many places not so well related
to what he's looking for, that are there just because they have paid
to be there.
The
first thing you must be aware of is that Pay per listing DOES NOT mean
that you will be included in Search engine's listings, or that you will
receive a shred of traffic!
Pay per
listing means that you pay to make them consider including your
site, and they will only include it, if your content meets their requirements.
If they
include you in their listing, the traffic you will receive will depend
on how high your pages rank! So you still have to optimize them to make
your keywords and keyword phrases rank high. And you need to do it more
than ever because it's costing you money to be listed!
IS
IT WORTHWHILE TO PAY PER LISTING
(or
pay for inclusion)?
If
you business isn't on line, it might be the fastest way to get tons
of visitors to your site
If
you already are on line and your log files tell you that you are already
receiving many visitors from Yahoo, then you don't need to pay to
be listed with Yahoo
If
you used to receive lots of visitors from Yahoo, and somehow you disappear
from their listing, it will be very wise to pay to be listed again
You
can never know how many visitors you will receive from a search engine
if you never appear on their listing
Have
you got so many visitors that you don't care if they include you or
not? (I think that NO ONE can answer yes to this question).
Bottom
line: If you are opening a new business and are short of money, you
can try other traffic builders first, but...
WHERE
SHOULD YOU PAY PER LISTING?
The most
important places you should look to be listed are:
LookSmart:
http://www.looksmart.com/ They provide their directory results
to: AltaVista, MSN, Excite, CNN and others, and claim to have more
traffic than Yahoo.
Is it
worth paying for their listing? Considering their size, I think they
are.
Yahoo:
http://www.yahoo.com/ It's indeed one of the strongest SE of
the Net and I don't think it could be a wise decision NOT to be in
it.
Inktomi:
http://www.inktomi.com/ Inktomi provides search services to
more than 100 partners, some of them so important as MSN, HotBot,
AOL and Answers.
Although
you can submit your web site for free to Inktomi through HotBot.com
or Canada.com they penalize free submissions with a lower ranking!
If you
don't have the money it's better to free submit than to be out of their
index, but it's better to let them discover you with their spider (that
will give you a higher rank)
Free submissions
are deleted from time to time, so if you DO have the money it's better
to pay for some of your most popular pages (they charge for each one
of them) and see how much traffic you receive.
Another
good thing about Inktomi is that if you pay, you will be in their listing
in 48 hs.
To submit
your web site to Inktomi, you will have to use some of their paid submission
partners
Position
Technologies: http://www.positiontech.com/ will charge you $20
for the first page and $ 10 for pages 2-1000
Network
Solutions: http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/catalog/searchsubmit/
Will charge
you $ 30 and $ 15 for similar service, but they will allow you many
special services like:
You
can change the URLs on your listings at any time
You
can add new pages and drop other pages
You
can use multiple domains' URLs
At this
moment, you can live without the service of other less important paid
Search Engines and Directories.
Bottom
line:
Why should you consider pay per listing? Because otherwise people won't
find your site, unless you are the Ford Motors Company or Coca-Cola.
Lets suppose
you sell a back massage widget. How will people that DON'T know you
find you on the net?
They will
go to one of the major Search Engines and make a search for "back massage"
or "massages", and you better be included and rank high on those terms
if you want them to find you.
So if you
are not Coca-Cola, you might want to consider being discovered on The
Net.
Written
by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi
This page is part of "How to Sell on
the Web"
