Should they be in your budget?
If you want to get listed fast on some of the most popular search
engines and directories, it's going to come with a price. While
many of the search engines still offer a way to submit your site
for free, they usually come with huge disclaimers. They will typically
say that they may or may not index your page, and if they do, it
will probably be months before they can get around to it. But for
a price, you can use their 'Priority' or 'Express' listing service
and get indexed in days instead of months.
You are not paying for rank
Remember, if you use this option, you are not being guaranteed
a favorable rank. You are merely being guaranteed that you will
be indexed in a shorter period of time. So you can spend your money
and find that while you are indexed, you are deep in the the search
rankings where nobody can find you.
Frequent Spidering
Many of the engines that offer this service offer a bit more than
just indexing your site. They also guarantee that your site will
be visited by their spider frequently. For example, Inktomi, which
powers many major search engines offers a fast inclusion service
for $39 per url. They guarantee that not only will your site be
indexed in a few days, but that for a full year, their spider will
visit your site every few days to check for changes. What this means
to you is that if your site doesn't rank well in their index, you
can further optimize it and ina few days their spider will give
it another look. You can do this over and over without ever having
to submit again.
Yahoo
When it comes to Yahoo, it is important to remember that it is
not a search engine. It is a directory, and they don't use a spider
to look at your site. A real human looks at every site before it
is listed. Yahoo charges $299 to look at your site if it
is a business site. For your $299, they don't guarantee that you
will be listed. They merely guarantee that someone will review it
for possible indexing within 7 days. While this is quite expensive,
Yahoo is an extremely important site. It is not only extremely popular,
but it also helps boost your site's link
popularity on other engines.
- You get around 5,000 visitors a month from search engines
- You traditionally have a 5% conversion ratio (5% of the new
visitors end up purchasing)
- Your average sale is $200
Spin Control
If you read the newsgroups, you will see some people
saying that because so many engines have switched to a paid format,
that there is no reason to use automated tools anymore. This is
far from the truth. Remember that when it comes to submission, there
are many engines that do not charge, and even though most of the
majors do charge, the other engines should not be discounted. Furthermore,
a tool like AddWeb is much more than a mere submission tool. Submission
is just one component of an overall solution. For example, you may
use paid submission for Inktomi, so you don't need AddWeb's submission
module for that engine, but you will use AddWeb to check your ranking,
see what keywords people are using, optimize your pages so that
the next time the spider visits you can boost your ranking, etc.
Do it in AddWeb
AddWeb has a section called 'PAY ENGINES'. This section provides
you a listing of engines that offer express or priority listing
services for their indexes. Within AddWeb, you can simply click
on an engine link and it will take you directly to their paid inclusion
pages.
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