Search engines-To pay or not no pay?Written by David Bell
While Web is still a great place for free advertising and promotion, there are some times that you simply have to put out... money, that is.I hear a lot of whining about how Internet is meant to be FREE. Why should we have to pay to be listed on a search engine? The answer is simple. Money.Not your money. The search engine's money. As in payroll, rent, servers, insurance, computers and so on. Do math. Assume it takes even as little as 3 minutes to process a site submission. That means an average employee can review at most 20 sites each hour. Or only 160 sites each day. Let's pretend that Yahoo! only gets 200,000 submissions per day. That would require 1,250 employees just to keep up with reviews, not counting supervisors, managers, support staff and all of other needs that 1,250 employees would have. That only takes care of new submissions. What about all of maintenance required to a database as large as theirs? URL changes. Dead links. Name changes. So what it really comes down to is this: people that say Net should be "Free" really mean that it should be free to them, as in somebody else should pay for it. Unless you want to wait a long time to start getting traffic from search engines, you are going to have to pay a few fees. Consider following four directories and solid value they offer in return for very reasonable fees. LookSmart Not being listed in LookSmart is like being Invisible Man. Oops. I guess that should be Invisible Person. The reality is that LookSmart reaches a larger Internet audience than any other entity. Because they supply search results to such portals as CNN, MSN, Excite and AltaVista as well as through their own search site, LookSmart is able to expose your site to over 77% of Internet population, or in round numbers, 58 million people. That's an impossible market penetration to ignore. If your site is non-commercial, you can submit your site for a listing at no charge. However, there is no guarantee as to when, or even if your site will get reviewed. If your site is commercial in nature, or if you want to get listed quickly in order to start your traffic flow, you have two options. Option 1 allows you to submit for a review that is guaranteed to occur within 8 weeks. The fee is $99 US. Option 2 costs $199 US and you are guaranteed to have your review within 48 hours. This is fastest path you will find to long-term, free traffic as fee is one time only. These options do not guarantee that you will be listed in LookSmart directory, but rather a guarantee that your site will be considered with stated time frame. GoTo.com GoTo.com started whole business of paid listings. Their model was unique when it launched. Site owners don't pay for listings - they pay for each visitor GoTo sends them as a result of site's listing.
| | How Your Network Affects Your PR Ratings...Written by Martin Lemieux
How Your Network Affects Your PR Ratings... By: Martin LemieuxIt's been long overdue that I've been wanting to talk about how owning a network of web sites, drastically affects your page ranking within Google. For some of you, you may closely watch what goes on with Page Ranking Within Google with your trusty toolbar, and some of you may not have a clue nor care enough to watch your web site popularity and stay glued to you se ranking like a hawk. If you've ever considered owning a successful network of web sites, you'll want to start paying close attention as to how your network affects your search positions. Page Ranking is like an ocean "tide", it comes and goes and then comes back again, feeding a never ending sea of web site owners and keeping them on shore to watch. What you want to notice is how owning a few "title waves" coming in, will drastically kill your page ranking but increase your search engine saturation. If you haven't heard term saturation before, it's merely referred to as amount of links within your site that gets listed by search engines. So if you have 20 pages within your web site, you should have 20 pages listed in search engines. If you don't have 20 pages listed, your search engine saturation is lower than it should be and you should concentrate on promoting ALL your pages, not just main page of your site. Personally owning a network of sites, and having worked on a network of 180 sites for one client, I've come to conclusion that if you want to reach a 6/10 Google ranking, don't merely rely on your network to get success. Like I mention in all my articles, search engines are getting smarter and can detect and sniff out a network of web sites created to help one thing, profit.
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