4. FAST(AllTheWeb) FAST Search results power listings at popular Lycos search portal. Lycos has largest global footprint of any Internet portal with more than 140 sites in 41 countries through its network of Web sites and partnerships. FAST results are also displayed at Lycos Europe, Ask Jeeves, AllTheWeb, WebCrawler, InfoSpace, Excite, DogPile, MetaCrawler and other international partners.

5. AltaVista Altavista is a pure search engine. As well as displaying Overture’s results, Altavista maintains 20 International search sites that are locally-optimized in each country to display its results. Submitting to main Altavista site will include you in all International sites.

6. Open Directory (DMOZ) While this directory does not even factor in Neilson/NetRatings results, its audience reach is significant. The Open Directory provides main search results to Netscape Search as well as categorized directory results at AOL, Google, Lycos and HotBot. Google regards a listing in Open Directory as very significant in terms of its PageRank system, so a listing here will give your site a higher ranking at Google.

7. LookSmart A listing at LookSmart will enable your site to be dispayed at very popular MSN – default search portal of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Google also regards a LookSmart listing highly in its PageRank system, which will in turn help your site’s ranking at Google.

8. Yahoo A listing in Yahoo’s directory has become less significant since they began to use Google search results as primary listings. If you rank well on Google, you will rank well at Yahoo and gain first rate exposure this popular search site provides. Google regards a listing at Yahoo as highly significant in terms of PageRank, so a listing here will in turn help your site’s relevancy with Google search engine. What you need to decide is: will a directory listing at Yahoo help boost your ranking enough on Google to warrant $299 annual fee Yahoo charges.

9. Ask Jeeves/Teoma Ask Jeeves search results are powered by Teoma. While this search portal is popular amongst Internet users, its reach is not that significant. If your aim is to have your site listed on all major search engines, then this would definitely be one to be listed with, although you may want to focus your efforts on gaining a high ranking on other more significant search engines above for maximum traffic. Ask Jeeves dispays top four results from Google’s AdWords and ad results from Lycos in a right hand column format.

What we can construe from above results is that majority of Internet search results are delivered by a small minority of search engines through a wide network of partner search portals. When planning your search engine positioning campaign, it is important to consider this. If you begin with idea of maximum audience reach in mind, your results will return a wider net of targeted traffic.

But, our site is brand new, and 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, audience reach of Yahoo! was 28.5%. Source: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)

Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Including Yahoo!, but not AltaVista: $520 (Includes Inktomi engines, 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 Inktomi engines, Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and AltaVista.)

What About Google?

Google http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Google is only major engine that doesn't have a pay inclusion program. So, only way to get your pages into index is to let spider find pages on its own through links on other pages or to submit through Google's free add URL.

Personally, I always let spider find pages on its own and never submit to Google manually. By going this route, while your site is busy being spidered by other engines and you're busy building link popularity, by 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, 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 power behind Google. Source: (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)

In Conclusion

Rather than worrying about submitting your pages manually to each of major engines, take advantage of tremendous benefits of using pay inclusion.

Then, let Google find your pages on its own, and hold off submitting to Yahoo! directory for a while.

Based on our example here, if we were submitting three pages, our total yearly cost would be either $221 or $415, depending on whether or not we chose to use AltaVista's pay inclusion program.

So, as you can see, benefits far outweigh costs. Repeating what I said earlier in this article, "key" to successful submissions these days can be summed up in two words: pay inclusion.