Not so long ago, the thought of paying to have sites ranked on a search engine was laughable. But as rampant commercialism of the World Wide Web has taken hold, more and more SE’s now require payment for listing or ranking.

Many engines require that you bid for top position on an ongoing pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis. Other companies now require payments of as much as US$299 to to have them review your site for inclusion, and then pay an annual fee if your site is accepted.

There is no guarantee that you will be listed once you have paid initial fees, or how much traffic you will receive as you’ll be in competition with other sites. Search engine optimization strategies, techniques and principles become even more important with some paid listings, otherwise you’ll be simply burning good money. Maintaining paid rankings is a time consuming and expensive process.

These new rankings/listings models present a number of challenges to those web site owners on a limited budget as the costs are out of reach for many. But there are options, and effective search engine optimization strategies that will actually generate web site traffic have become an even more urgent issue in relation to free listings. It’s well documented that you need to be listed in the first 3 pages of results, otherwise it’s a waste of time. If paid listings are taking up the first 5 or 10 results, the competition for the residual prime placements is fierce.

Current search engine URL submission overview
The following is a brief rundown on the major engines/indexes and their paid/free listings policies (current May 2002). NOTE: If you run a community based site, in many instances the company can be approached directly and you can have your web site listed for free.

Yahoo: US$299.00 non-refundable, recurring annual fee

AltaVista: You can still submit up to 5 pages at a time for free, but be prepared for a long wait. “Express” inclusion starts at around $US39 for *one page* (cheaper for subsequent web pages).

LookSmart & MSN: US$49 setup fee, then US$0.15 per click

AskJeeves & Teoma: US$30.00 for the first page (cheaper for subsequent web pages)

Google: Still by far the best free URL submission search engine, but also runs paid listings for top “sponsored links” and side boxes. If you aren’t ranked well in Google as yet, make the effort to be as soon as possible. Google supplies secondary data to a number of other search engines/indices and sites.

DMOZ: Still a strong community of independent editors, free listings, but you are only listed once. But considering that DMOZ supplies data to hundreds of search engines/indices and sites, it’s absolutely essential to be listed here.

Lycos/Hotbot: $18 annual membership fee and then $12 per URL.

AllTheWeb: Another good free URL submission option. Submit your home page URL to them and they will spider your whole site.

Overture: Pay per click. This model requires that you bid on keywords for ranking and at times the competition can become quite insane - some advertisers go overboard. As an example, I recently reported that on the word “computer”, the no.1 advertiser had bid US$10 for the privilege. The number 2 position was held by an advertiser prepared to pay US$.77 per click. It’s a huge difference. Coupled with the fact that not everyone who clicks on the link will purchase, it becomes an extraordinarily expensive marketing exercise, even at 77 cents per clickthrough. The COA (Cost of Acquisition) tied in with each sale is not viable for the majority of online ecommerce oriented businesses.

Optimize your rankings while you can
Some web masters may tell you that as the SE landscape is rapidly changing, search engine optimization is a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth! 95% of our new visitors come from search engines and we don’t spend a cent on rankings at this point. What we do spend is time, lots of it, in an effort to boost rankings and compete with the “big guys”. The effort has paid off and we receive many thousands of visitors a week from our high ranking free listings. There’s nothing more satisfying than achieving higher rankings on important keyphrases over a company with a multi-million dollar advertising budget ;0)

It is also very important to improve search engine free listings while you can. More and more companies will turn to the paid model, and at times to the total exclusion of everyone else. In these situations, as has been the case with Yahoo recently, listings already included in their own database are “grandfathered”. This means that the listing stays, all new business pays.

Search engine optimization is a legitimate promotion strategy
Search engine optimization is a buzz phrase that has been around for a long time, but it’s surprising how many people still do not properly understand the concept. In my home town of Adelaide, which is the capital city of South Australia, mentioning the term often draws blank looks from web masters and site owners. Many think it’s some sort of scam.

Search engine optimization is not about scamming or fooling search engine “spiders” (the software used by the companies to crawl through your site and index it). It’s about making the best of what you have and making what you have the best. Solid content is still king, forget the pretty pictures and Flash animations - the more valuable information you have, presented correctly, the higher the ranking and the more visitors you’ll get from your free listings.

The Search Engine Optimization Professional (SEOP)
URL submission fever and competition for high search engine rankings has given birth to a new industry - that of the SEOP (Search Engine Optimization Professional). Many of these “professionals” charge around US$150 per hour for their skills. Few are worth this kind of money. If you choose to utilise the consultancy services of an SEOP, make sure you carry out exhaustive background checks on the person/company first. Anyone can arrange to have tens of thousands of visitors sent to you (for a fee), it’s not that hard to achieve, but in most cases, this will be garbage traffic - people not interested in what you are offering. If someone approached me today wanting 10,000 visitors directed to their site by tomorrow, I could do so - it would only cost them a few hundred dollars, but it would be a waste of their advertising budget.

There are a number of automated URL submission software programs available which promise to increase your traffic. Few do and many will cause damage to your listings. Many so-called “bleeding-edge” strategies and optimization techniques are bandied about in forums - be very wary as some of these strategies will not only damage your listings, but may get you kicked out - forever.

Tried and True Optimization Techniques
The following is a list of 8 tried and true strategies for increasing your profile in search engine rankings - stick by these to begin with before you begin trying the more exotic strategies, and remember - don’t gamble what you can’t afford to lose. These techniques apply to most paid and free listings. At the end of this article are links to specific tutorials on the points mentioned that you may find useful.

Content is King - Provide information, lots of it and ensure that is relevant to your subject and that it contains popular keywords and phrases in relation to your topic or industry

Meta Tags - Meta tags are the sections of your HTML that provide direction and information for search engine robots. To get the best rankings possible in some search engines, be sure to use keywords, description and title tags every web page. Meta tags are not viewable to Internet users unless they examine the source code of your pages. Even search engine spiders such as Googlebot will use the description tag if there is a problem with spidering body content. Try to use different description tags for each page. This is a point I ignored as I thought I didn’t have the time to create a set of tags for each page. It was a big mistake that I’m now slowly rectifying. While our search engine generated web site traffic stats are nothing to be sneezed at, there is always room for improvement ;0)

Exterior links - The more sites you can have linking to you, the higher you will be ranked in some of the major engines. But not all links are created equal. Many links coming into your site from low quality sites may damage your rankings. So will buying & hosting a hundred domain names and publishing up a brief page with links to your site. Worse still, links coming in from FFA sites may destroy your rankings altogether. Aim to be linked from popular sites.

“Alt” text - Search engines can’t read images, so ensure that descriptive “alt” text is added to your coding.

Transparency - I received an email yesterday from a major engine stating that they wouldn’t include a site I had submitted because there wasn’t an email address on the home page. While this was a glitch on the engine’s part as there was an email address, it was a good reminder that some companies demand that your site contain proper contact points, privacy statements etc. - and that they do enforce their policies

Study submission guidelines - Take the the time before hitting the submit button to study the URL submission guidelines of each site - they will vary. To ignore even one small point can prevent your site from being listed.

Target - Just as your site’s content should be focused, so should your search engine optimization strategies initially. Submit to all engines, but focus on gaining high rankings on one or two before moving on to others. If you try and optimize for all, you may only acheive mediocre rankings across the board. The difference between No.1 position and No.30 position can literally translate into thousands of dollars of income a year. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Frames are evil - Framed sites can be optimized for search engines, but it is very, very time consuming. Use server side includes (SSI) or FrontPage Includes as an alternative to framing.

Further Learning Resources
The following articles, guides and tutorials will assist you with developing a search engine optimization strategy. Nearly a hundred other Internet marketing, web site development and promotion articles are listed on the following pages:

Article - Tutorial Index 1
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/articlemain.htm

Article - Tutorial Index 2
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/articlemain2.htm

Title tag guidelines
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/titletag.htm

Paragraph One
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/paragraph1.htm

Meta Tags and Zen
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/metatags.htm

Buying Web Site Traffic
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/buywebtraffic.htm
Site Promotion - The Common Courtesy Strategy
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles2/internet-marketing-etiquette.htm

Basic ecommerce web site design
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/ articles/ecommerce-site-s1p1.htm

Categories: Search Engine Marketing
Tags: SEO