Imagine walking into your local car dealership to look at a new car. The salesman hurries over and tells you that you must pay $199 before he shows you car. And even if you decide to buy, he might decide not to sell it to you anyway if he doesn’t like way you look.

Yet this is basically what some directories and search engines are doing now. Yahoo tell us that there are no guarantees that you will get your website listed in their directory even if you do pay $199 fee. That money is just to ask them to consider reviewing your website. If they are overwhelmed with submissions they may not get around to looking at it for weeks or even months. How many other businesses could get away with such a lousy attitude?

If you have a question for someone at any of these sites, try asking it. First, you have to search high and low to find an e-mail link or response form. In some cases, you’ll never find it because it just isn’t there. Then, even if you do write, you probably won’t receive a reply.

And what happens if, after paying your $199 fee, Yahoo decides your website just doesn’t come up to their standards? You lose your money with no way of appealing their decision. They just take your money and ignore you.

Add to this their mostly non-existent customer service and we see a recipe for disaster – Theirs.

SKEWED RESULTS

Then there is ‘hidden’ problem that most users probably never even think about. All we are going to see on Yahoo from now on are companies that have paid to be listed. And of these, some have paid a premium for their listing to be placed at top. Obviously, search results are going to be seriously skewed.

But what is worse, companies that registered with these directories before fee service started now find themselves deleted from those same directories and forced to pay. This is cheating and extortion on a grand scale.

In addition, there are lots of small companies out there that can’t afford to pay out $200 to all these directories in hope of getting some visitors. If even 10 directories charge, that’s a lot of money to fork out – with no guarantee that money will achieve anything.

Naturally, thousands of visitors should produce at least hundreds of sales. Or, even on a bad day, you should get a few sales.

But search engines rarely deliver what we expect. In this article I tell you why and show you simple ways to fix problem.

Strike one: Let me give you a recent example from my own experience. I got one of my sites listed high on Yahoo, number one search engine. Friends told me you can expect a giant flood of visitors. Yup, if you consider twenty hits a week a flood, I guess I was all wet.

Strike two: Next, I decided to purchase a high ranking on some of top pay-per-click search engines. The bid rates were low on NetFlip.com and my site had no problem ranking number one for several popular keywords my customers use most.

Yikes! The hits poured in. I got 400 visitors a day. That's not thousands of visitors larger sites get daily, but 400 people searching for a site like mine should contain at least a few buying customers.

Not so. After several weeks of being welcome mat for NetFlip's hordes, my site didn't sell a single thing. Could be a case of lackluster copy or a bad product. But an identical offer using exact same copy was selling like gangbusters on my other site.

Strike three: Ok, so smaller pay-per-click sites just don't deliver PAYING customers. Maybe they're all folks trying to earn a penny to two by surfing from one site to next, I don't know.

I figured if you want BIG results you have to get on BIG search engines. GoTo has a deal where if you get in top three listings on their site, you'll be listed at top of page on such major search engines at AltaVista and HotBot.

By hook or crook, that kind of listing is as good as it gets. Expensive, but probably good. The plan produced a steady trickle of visitors. Once in a while one buys.