Day 18: Build Paid Traffic – Part IV
Reminder:
Goal-of-the-DAY... If you have a new site and the Return on Investment justifies it, jump-start your traffic-building efforts by bidding on less popular keywords related to your theme at one of the Pay-Per-Click engines.
8.4. Pay For Listing/Placement At The “Free” Search Engines
Over the last few years, the SEs have been gradually phasing out their paid inclusion programs. Today, Yahoo! is the only major SE that maintains one.
With a paid inclusion program, you must pay to have your Web site included in a SE's database. It is not the same as a Pay-Per-Click Search Engine, where you pay a certain amount to be ranked in a certain position. Pay-per-inclusion does not guarantee ranking. It only guarantees you'll be included in the index!
Paid programs limit the SEs' ability to develop competitive databases from which to draw targeted search results. Obviously when you implement such a policy, you eliminate vast amounts of business owners who cannot justify the cost of inclusion. This leads to inferior search results. And when search results are poor, visitors will go elsewhere and ad revenues plummet.
Google had the foresight long ago to avoid a paid program. Over the years, it has built the largest and most competitive search database available on the Net.
The other SEs are still trying to catch up! Most have dropped their paid programs, and even Yahoo!, the last SE to operate such a service, actively adds sites to its database for free.
Please note that I’m talking about buying your way into Yahoo!’s crawler-based Service, and not the directory (which we discussed in earlier post.)
For that reason, there is very little reason for you to pay for a Yahoo! listing. Follow the proven C -> T -> P -> M process to build a content-rich site and obtain a couple of quality in-pointing links. Yahoo! will be happy to add you for free.
Why would you consider Yahoo!’s paid service? If you’ve submitted your site for free, and still aren’t included after 2 months, you may want to submit a single page. By doing so, you’ll get…
1) Fast inclusion into the index. You’ll often find yourself waiting up to 2 months after your site has been crawled before your site makes it into an SE index. Paying for inclusion means you should see your site included within a couple of days.
2) Repeated, regular spiderings. Page modification efforts are noticeable in a matter of a couple of days -- no waiting around for weeks for a spider to re-index your page and to display those changes in the SE’s listing results.
3) Guaranteed continuous inclusion. Search Engines are pretty mysterious creatures. One day, your site will be sitting pretty with a top 20 ranking, and the next day it’s gone, disappeared without a trace. Yes, it sometimes happens.
The SEs cull pages from their respective indices for no discernible reason.
Paying for your listing means it will never be dropped from the index.
Best of all, Yahoo!’s SiteMatch program will provide entry of your URLs into the entire Yahoo! network, which includes FAST/AllTheWeb, AltaVista, About, the unpaid listings in Overture, and most importantly, the search results delivered on Yahoo! itself. Of course, this comes at a hefty price…
First, Yahoo! charges a non-refundable annual review fee (yes, a Yahoo! Editor will review your content to ensure it meets certain quality criteria). Plus, there is a cost-per-click fee. Highly competitive categories (ex., real estate, professional services, electronics, etc.) will have a cost-per-click double the others.
At this point, unless you're driving traffic to a page with a proven Conversion Rate and established ROI, Yahoo!’s program is an expensive gamble, only to be investigated if you’ve failed to get listed through the normal means.
We’ve noticed Yahoo! has an increased willingness to spider and add sites to its database for free. At this point at least, there’s little point for paying for inclusion into Yahoo!. If, however, you'd like to investigate this option further, you can do so here...
http://www.positiontech.com/ds-overture.html
Bottom line for all Pay For Listing/Placement services? Stick to Pay-Per-Click offerings that bring you targeted customers and yield measurable results. Kill programs with poor results.
Time to wrap up the topic of Building Paid Traffic...
Pay-Per-Click SEs are good tools to bolster or supplement the free traffic you are obtaining from your highly optimized Keyword-Focused Content Pages. PPCs can bring you guaranteed, targeted and cheap traffic. Investigate how you can best use them to promote your business after you have created a minimum of 15-20 content pages.
Don’t make the mistake of relaying solely on the PPCs for traffic. High-quality content is what builds momentum.
Directories, on the other hand, won’t drive a ton of traffic to your Web site. Sure, you’ll get some visitors. However, their true value comes through the provision of quality in-pointing links.
As link popularity continues to grow in importance, so too does the importance of a couple of qualifying links. The best major directories and second tier directories offer just such links.
Key point of this DAY?
If you have an immature Web site, you really should investigate a few of the directory options presented in this chapter. You don’t need to spend a lot of money but a couple of decent links will go a long way to keep the SEs spidering.
Before proceeding to the next topic, please complete your DAY 15-18 Goal-of-the-DAY, and take note of your Ongoing Goal...
Ongoing Goal... When your site reaches 15-20 pages, submit to directories. If you build a good site that delivers high-value content, you’ll get into the directories. Being listed in a directory will not generate more traffic but it will provide a quality relevant in-pointing link.
Broaden your PPC bidding until you have placed bids for 100 keywords at the 8 biggest Pay-Per-Clicks (if your ROI justifies it).
Two of the “Big 3” down, one to go…
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