Search Engine Paid Inclusion
These days, most of the major search engines have some type
of method that serves as a form of express search engine submission
by paying your way in. In some cases, you'll be paying to
see that your web site is indexed more quickly, and in some
cases you'll be purchasing ad space that can tide you over
until your regular listings start to kick in.
Probably the most popular paid inclusion program for spidering
search engines belongs to search provider Inktomi. A listing
in Inktomi can drive strong traffic since it provides secondary
results to popular portal site MSN as well as Hotbot, Looksmart
and Overture. In addition, Yahoo! recently purchased Inktomi,
which could result it in becoming a major player in the field
of search once again. For a cost of about $40US/url per year,
you can purchase an express listing and a guaranteed spider
visit every 48 hours to each web page that you pay to include.
This is a great way to get an initial listing while waiting
for natural inclusion and the frequent respidering gives you
a chance to tweak your pages and see how each change impacts
your ranking.
Alta Vista, FAST and Ask Jeeves/Teoma offer similar express
listing programs. Prices range from $30-$40US per url and
the paid inclusion lasts for six months to a year. As with
Inktomi, most of these engines will eventually find you on
your own if you have taken the time to submit your site to
directories, but using the paid inclusion will speed things
up a bit and let you see results from the beginning.
Popular paid placement services such as Overture, Google
AdWords, Findwhat and Sprinks make it possible to not only
get your site listed in search results in no time at all,
but to decide which phrases, and in some cases which ranking
position you want it to show up for. Most of these programs
require a minimum monthly advertising budget to get started,
but nearly all have keyword phrases that can be purchased
for less than 25 cents a click. There are a few important
points to keep in mind about paid inclusion programs and the
impact they have on the placement of your web site in the
rankings.
All of the paid inclusion programs offered by the major search
engines are on a per url basis. That means that if you want
every page of your site listed, you'll need to pay a fee for
each and every page of your site. Paid inclusion spiders visit
the page that has been paid for and index the content contained
on that page. Paid inclusion spiders do not follow links,
so paying for your index page to be included will not lead
to the rest of your web site being spidered. Using paid inclusion
to get your index page listed doesn't keep the "regular"
spiders from finding your web site on their own, and when
they do, it's likely that they will then find and index the
entire site. Thus, paid inclusion should be viewed as a way
to speed up the inclusion of your index page to give you a
bare minimum presence in the search results until your web
site is included naturally.
Similarly, using paid placement ad programs will not serve
as the ultimate solution to your indexing issues. Paid advertisements
stop showing up when you stop paying for them. Using these
ads to drive some immediate traffic to your web site while
you wait for full indexing can be a great way to gain exposure
for your site in the short term, but it can become expensive
if you use it as a long-term traffic solution, especially
if your site is non-commercial. If you plan to continue your
paid ad programs after your site is fully indexed, you'll
want to carefully track your return on investment and view
it as any other type of advertising expenditure.
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