Lesson #28 Pay Per Inclusion: Worth the Investment?
Written By Cyndalie

Today, only about half of all search engine traffic can be marketed to for free. As more search engines gravitate towards the pay per URL inclusion (PPI) model, it has become more and more difficult for webmasters to select and manage to successfully rank high in these types of engines. Your first concern should be presence; what is the market reach of each PPI engine and what are your goals for that engine in particular? Your second concern will be; how can I optimize my site for ranking, say in Inktomi powered engines, yet not interfere with my optimization and rankings in Google? And finally, which ones are just plain worth it, and which ones are not?

Market Reach

PositionTech.com offers some of the best pay per inclusion packages and an entire range of services to help you manage, track, and adjust your PPI campaign. By using Direct Submit you can select or choose both primary packages focused on Inktomi and Fast/Alltheweb.com powered engines. For a look at the current market reach of search engines go to http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451 by Search Engine Watch.

Inktomi Search Submit (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/srchsb/index.php) is your doorway into Yahoo, Altavista, All the Web and Overture. Keep in mind that inclusion in pay per click engines means that your URL will be listed and ranked for keywords that have either not been bid on or "other listings" in general that compromise all content that is not PPC generated.

Trusted Feed is for sites over 500 pages that is updated frequently and is the best option having full sites indexed.

The benefits to paid inclusion via Position Tech, is that your URL's will be included within 24-72 hours and reindexed every 2 days! Your URL will be included for one year and click thru reports are available to help you maximize your campaign and rankings.

For MSN Paid search placement options (similar to Adwords) visit http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/arp/msnsrch.php and for Yahoo only Paid Inclusion Options visit http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/.

Make sure you READ THE FINE PRINT as packages and terms (including rebilling intervals) change frequently.

Making the Most of It

There is a delicate balance to achieving rankings in every engine you want using one singular home page. Since Google heavily relies on your home page for ranking, if you have good rankings already, you do not want to change the optimization of your home page for ranking in Inktomi. My suggestion is to copy your index page and rename it something other than the default index page on your server, but still be a common default page name. For example, if your default home page on your server is index.html, create a copy of index.html and rename it index.htm. Therefore index.html is your default page when you type in Mydomain.com. However index.htm will be what you submit to Inktomi allowing you to change and tweak the optimization of that page specifically for Inktomi.

Since both Inktomi and Fast will reindex your PPI submitted page every 2 days, you now have the opportunity to tweak your pages for ranking until you are satisfied with your positioning. Rather than waiting a month or more for inclusion and indexing to see if your optimization helped or hurt, you can keep on it until you are ranked where you want to be. Keep in mind however, everyone else can keep tweaking their pages too, so check your reports and rankings once every week or two to make sure you haven't been pushed out.

Other PPI Options

Altavista has also gone the PPI route. However you can still submit to Altavista for free. Considering how their user base has dropped so significantly in the past 2 years, my recommendation is to keep submitting for free until circumstance force us otherwise. Since Altavista has been purchased by Overture, it now defaults through Yahoo's free search submit at http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request. Submit every optimized URL you have via Basic Submission.

Lycos has an even smaller user base today than Altavista according to Netratings. Lycos only offers pay per click advertising on a bid basis similar to Overture. Visit http://insite.lycos.com/ for full information.

AskJeeves had changed it's tune once again. " Ask Jeeves has discontinued the Site Submit program. As of 31st August 2004, we stopped accepting paid URLs into our index." Advetising options are limited.

Pay per inclusion engines are still a very affordable way to cover the other 50% of search engine market reach that we cannot get in front of for free.