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One area of search engine marketing that has changed dramatically over the years is submissions. One area of search engine marketing that has changed dramatically over the years is submissions. Submitting to the search engines used to be so complicated, with having to choose between manual versus software submissions; only being able to submit so many pages a day; having to be careful about oversubmitting; and the list goes on.
Submissions used to be the worst part of the search engine optimization process, at least for me.
Now, I can literally write this whole article in two words:
Pay Inclusion
Yep, there you have it. If you want to take the headache out of submissions and if you want to make things much easier for YOU, use pay inclusion!
It's hard for someone like me to admit how powerful pay inclusion programs are, because I've been in this "game" long enough to remember when everything was free. So, moving into the pay realm has been a difficult thing to do.
However, the benefits of pay inclusion far outweigh the cost.
Benefits of Pay Inclusion
* Your pages are indexed much faster than submitting through free add URL or waiting for the spiders to find the pages on their own.
* By using pay inclusion, your pages are getting outside of the 95%+ spam that the engines say come through free add URL submissions.
* With pay inclusion, your pages are respidered on a very regular basis, depending on the engine. For example, Inktomi and Fast respider their pay inclusion pages every 48 hours.
* With pay inclusion, you never have to submit your pages again! As long as you continue to use pay inclusion, your pages will continue to get respidered based on each engine's schedule.
* Because your pages are respidered on a regular basis without your doing one single thing to initiate this action, you can make changes to your pages today and begin to see the results of those changes within a week. If you didn't use pay inclusion, you may not see the results of the changes for a month or two.
* If you use pay inclusion, you're forming a "partnership" with the search engines, which I personally feel is important and very beneficial. You're now outside of the realm of the millions of spammers, and that's exactly where you want to be.
* Most of the pay inclusion programs offer some sort of submission reports.
* Pay inclusion programs are ideal for dynamically generated sites.
Now that we've looked at the benefits of pay inclusion, let's create an example to see how inexpensive it really is. Let's say we have a brand new Web site, and we have three main pages that we want to submit through pay inclusion.
Pay Inclusion Programs
Inktomi (Provides secondary search results to engines such as MSN and HotBot) http://www.positiontech.com/directSubmit.htm
Benefits:
* Upon submission, your pages will make it into the Inktomi index within 72 hours, as a general rule.
* Your pages are respidered every 48 hours.
* The term of the pay inclusion program is 12 months.
* Reporting services are included, such as verification of page acceptance; refresh reports; URL validation; and account management.
* Here's the audience reach of some of the engines that use Inktomi's secondary results, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002: MSN: 28.1%; Overture: 5.4%; LookSmart: 3.0%; (also provides results to the "new" HotBot) (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
* Cost? $39 for the first URL, and $25 each for additional URL's up to 1000. So, the total cost for our three pages would be $89. (See Special Note at the bottom of this article on how you can save 20% off the price of Inktomi and Fast pay inclusion – for a limited time only.)
Fast (Provides search results to AlltheWeb, Lycos, and HotBot) http://www.positiontech.com/directSubmit.htm
You can use Position Tech to submit your Fast pages too, so be sure to enroll in both pay inclusion programs at the same time.
Benefits:
* Upon submission, your pages will make it into the Fast index within 48 hours, as a general rule.
* Your pages are respidered every 48 hours.
* The term of the pay inclusion program is 12 months.
* Reporting services are included, such as verification of page acceptance; refresh reports; URL validation; and account management.
* With Fast, you can choose between several different programs, including some that include a free onsite search engine, bulk inclusion, etc.
* The audience reach of Fast, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002, was: Lycos: 4.4%; (also provides results to the "new" HotBot) (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
* Cost? $34 for the first URL, and $16 each for additional URL's up to 1000. So, the total cost for our three pages would be $66. (See Special Note at the bottom of this article on how you can save 20% off the price of Inktomi and Fast pay inclusion – for a limited time only.)
Teoma and Ask Jeeves (Provides results to Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and HotBot) http://ask.ineedhits.com/
The only way to get in the Teoma index is through pay inclusion. This is one engine that doesn't have a free add URL page.
Benefits:
* Upon submission, your pages will make it into the Teoma and Ask Jeeves indices within 7 days.
* Your pages are respidered every 7 days.
* The term of the pay inclusion program is 12 months.
* Reporting services are included, such as click-through reporting.
* The audience reach of Teoma/Ask Jeeves, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002, was: Ask Jeeves: 10.3% (also provides results to the "new" HotBot) (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
* Cost? $30 for the first URL, and $18 each for additional URL's up to 1000. So, the total cost for our three pages would be $66.
AltaVista (Provides results to AltaVista) http://addurl.altavista.com/
Benefits:
* Upon submission, your pages will make it into the AltaVista index within 2 business days.
* Your pages are respidered every 24 hours.
* The term of the pay inclusion program is 6 months.
* Reporting services are included, such as tracking submissions and transactions through their online Account Management Center.
* The audience reach of AltaVista, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002, was: AltaVista: 4.4% (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
* Cost? $39 for the first URL, and $29 each for 2-10 URL's, then $19 each for 11 to 500 URLs. So, the total cost for our three pages for **six months** would be $97. The cost per year would be $194.
Downside:
AltaVista's pay inclusion is more expensive than the others, and AV doesn't have the coverage that some of the other engines have. Plus, their pay inclusion program is only for six months, as compared to a full year with the other programs.
So, you'll have to decide whether you feel it's worth the cost.
AltaVista is the one engine where you can still use their free add URL without being placed into the same category as the huge group of "free add URL spammers," because AltaVista's free add URL process doesn't allow mass submissions. Instead, their unique "puzzle submission" process requires you to enter a submission code into the submission box, and you can only submit five URLs at no cost. So, if you want to use free add URL for one of the engines, AltaVista's is the one to use. http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
Total Costs so Far
With our example, considering that this is a brand new Web site with zero visibility, we'll figure out the cost for our three pages based on using AltaVista's pay inclusion program and on not using their program.
Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Without AltaVista: $221 (for 3 pages) (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves. This does NOT include AltaVista.)
Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs With AltaVista: $415 (for 3 pages) (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista.)
Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com
You might be wondering why I haven't listed the Yahoo! directory in this listing of pay inclusion programs. With the way that Yahoo! now displays results, which are almost a duplication of Google results, the importance of submitting to the Yahoo! directory at a yearly cost of $299 has diminished. Depending on where things go from here, with Yahoo! having purchased the Inktomi engine, this is subject to immediate change. But, at this point in time, paying to be included in the Yahoo! directory isn't anywhere near as important as it once was. If you have good visibility in Google, you should have good visibility in Yahoo!.
But, our site is brand new, and the advantage to Yahoo!'s pay inclusion program is that your site will be reviewed for possible inclusion within 7 working days. So, depending on our finances, we may want to add Yahoo!'s pay inclusion costs, just so we can get fast visibility for our new site.
(According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience reach of Yahoo! was 28.5%. http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Including Yahoo!, but not AltaVista: $520 (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and Yahoo!. This does NOT include AltaVista.)
Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Including both Yahoo! and AltaVista: $714 (Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and AltaVista.)
What about Google?
Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Google is the only major engine that doesn't have a pay inclusion program. So, the only way to get your pages into the index is to let the spider find the pages on its own through links on other pages or to submit through Google's free add URL.
Personally, I always let the spider find the pages on its own and never submit to Google manually. By going this route, while your site is busy being spidered by the other engines and you're busy building link popularity, by the time that Google "finds" your pages, you should have had time to build some link popularity, which we all know is so important with Google.
According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience reach of Google alone was 29.2%. Add to that AOL at 19.7%, Yahoo! at 28.5%, and Netscape at 5.5%, and it's quite easy to see the power behind Google. (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
In Conclusion
Rather than worrying with submitting your pages manually to each of the major engines, take advantage of the tremendous benefits of using pay inclusion.
Then, let Google find your pages on its own, and hold off submitting to the Yahoo! directory for a while.
Based on our example here, if we were submitting three pages, our total yearly cost would be either $221 and $415, depending on whether or not we chose to use AltaVista's pay inclusion program.
So, as you can see, the benefits far outweigh the costs. Repeating what I said earlier in this article, the "key" to successful submissions these days can be summed up in two words: pay inclusion.
Special Note:
After writing this article, I found that Lycos is offering a discount on both Fast and Inktomi pay inclusion programs for a limited time. If you submit to both engines, you can receive a 20% discount! I don't know how long this will last, but here's the URL:
http://insite.lycos.com/searchservices/select/select_overview.asp?co=undefined
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists, (http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses (http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-optimizer.com). She also teaches 2-, 3-, and 5-day hands-on search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com).
Copyright 2003 Robin Nobles. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Robin Nobles teaches "hands on" search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe with Search Engine Workshops (http://www.searchengineworkshops.com), and she teaches online search engine marketing courses through http://www.onlinewebtraining.com. She has written three books that can be ordered through Amazon and other bookstores.