• Free Search Engines

• Pay-For-Inclusion Search Engines

• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engines

• Directories

Because each type does things a little differently, you need to adapt your strategy to take advantage of their differences.

Free Search Engines

You can submit your pages to these engines free, but be careful. You must make sure not to over-submit (submit too often) or you'll be banned and never get listed.

Always check to see if your site is listed before submitting it.

Pay-For-Inclusion Search Engines

With this type of Search Engine, you pay to have your web site listed in their database. Pay-for-inclusion Search Engines (and paid section of free engines) are a quick way to get listed in some major databases -- for a price, literally. The cost varies from engine to engine.

The advantages are threefold:

1. Faster inclusion into Search Engine's index.

2. Repeated, regular spiderings.

3. Guaranteed continuous inclusion.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engines

Like many folks, I have been using KEI for some time now to determine what keywords I should target with my web site. And this has led me to becoming concerned with results KEI provides and keywords it suggests. I need to say here that my concern is very subjective as many folks are happily using KEI and don't seem to have a problem with it.

My main concern with KEI is that, by way it works, it strongly favours demand numbers without, I feel, sufficiently taking into account corresponding supply numbers.

I need to say here that I interpret supply numbers as a representation of how competitive a keyword is. For example, if keyword 1 has a supply of 200,000 while keyword 2 has a supply of 5,000,000, then I would consider keyword 2 as being more competitive than keyword 1.

And all things being equal, I would prefer to target a keyword that is less competitive and with less demand, rather than a highly competitive keyword that has a higher demand. The reason for this is that I feel that I have a better chance of cornering a section of a less competitive market than I do that of a highly competitive one.

Based on my concern with KEI, I have decided to create an alternative. I have called this alternative "Competition Indexed Demand" (CID). Now, CID works out marketing potential of keywords in a similar way to KEI but it uses a different formula, one that takes more into account supply numbers of keywords (or their competitiveness).

For example, using "ranking" as starting keyword with Overture, KEI suggests following top 3 keywords,

Keyword Demand Supply KEI nfl quarterback ranking 43,474 75,800 24,934 nfl power ranking 43,171 122,000 15,277 college basketball ranking 71,149 541,000 9,357

while CID suggests following top 3 keywords,

Keyword Demand Supply CID dick vitale college basketball ranking 16,983 33,400 640 nfl quaterback ranking 43,474 75,800 427 vote nba power ranking 3,129 30,200 394