Paying to Get in the Major Search Engines

We used to have all kinds of tips on spending some of your ad dollars on pay-for-inclusion. However, this is a declining business model only used by a few minor search engine that aren't worth your time.

Here is my take on where to put your pay for inclusion dollars - nowhere. If you happen to find one, please don't waste your money on paying for inclusion, they provide very little benefit to your website.

Intomi, Fast! and Alta Vista all gave up on pay for inclusion so the could compete with Google's "free" listing. Because no one is paying to get their site listed, they did not have much of a database of sites to search against.

If you want to increase your website traffic, there are only two things that are worth paying money for.

1. Pay Per Click listings

When you pay a search engine for each visitor they send to your site, this is called pay per click (PPC). Pay per click listings are usually marked as advertisements or “Sponsored Links” and appear above or beside the search engine’s organic listings.

Pay per click listings in Google and Yahoo are quick and simple way to get traffic to your site. You select the key words you want to be listed in and you get charged every time someone clicks on your link. Some key words can cost you up to $10 per click, and just because some one has gone to your website, it doesn't mean they will buy anything and you still have to pay Google or Yahoo (This is how Google made the 2005 fortune 500 List)

The primary benefit of pay per click is the immediate results and complete control it offers the advertiser. You can commit $50, or $50,000. You may target one set of keywords today, and if they don’t work out you may target an entirely different set of keywords tomorrow.

As a short term strategy, pay per click is ideal. The drawback of PPC is the cost. A top position for some search terms can cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars each day. Over the long term, search engine optimization is much more cost effective.

2. Search Engine Marketing (search engine optimization)

A good search engine marketing plan is the best solution for the long term success of your website.

A myth exists that organic search engine optimization is cheap. It isn’t. If you are targeting a search term along the lines of “web hosting”, you’ll be looking at a minimum of five figures.

Even so, organic pay per click is most often more cost effective than pay per click. Organic search engine placement is often done by creating link popularity, and it is often a link popularity that endures long afterwards.

One of the drawbacks of organic search engine placement is the time required to get your website to the top. Insofar as search engines do not update their indices daily or even weekly, it can two months or more to see the full effects of a professional optimization job.

There is a rule of thumb in advertising. It says that if a campaign achieves full ROI (Return on Investment), it is worth doing. That is to say, if the cost of advertising is earned back by the ad, it’s worth doing. By this standard, you may often justify the cost of PPC. But the fact remains that it leaves you with little or no margin.

The purpose of search engine optimization is to increase those margins.

Learn more about search engine optimization