Search engines-To pay or not no pay?

While the 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 the
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 the 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 the reviews, not counting supervisors,
managers, support staff and all of the other needs that 1,250
employees would have. That only takes care of the new
submissions. What about all of the maintenance required to a
database as large as theirs? URL changes. Dead links. Name
changes. So what it really comes down to is this: the people
that say the 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 the
following four directories and the solid value they offer in
return for very reasonable fees. LookSmart Not being listed in
LookSmart is like being the Invisible Man. Oops. I guess that
should be the 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 the
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 the fastest path
you will find to long-term, free traffic as the fee is one time
only. These options do not guarantee that you will be listed in
the LookSmart directory, but rather a guarantee that your site
will be considered with the stated time frame. GoTo.com GoTo.com
started the 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 the
site's listing. When you set up an account on GoTo, you select
as many keywords as you want that are relevant to your site and
you enter the amount you will pay for each visitor. The more you
pay, the higher you are listed in the results. Some keywords
only cost two or three cents to be listed on the first page of
results. Some are well over a dollar per visitor. The cost is
determined by all of the people bidding for traffic through that
keyword. In the past my advice has been to only bid enough to be
on the first page of a search result. That way you were assured
of getting a good flow of traffic without paying to be number
one in that category. Times have changed and I now suggest that
you bid to be in the top five results for your primary keywords.
GoTo has begun supplying results for other search engines, but
usually they are only supplying the first five results and the
search engine then uses its own database to supply the remainder
of the results. This makes it a better investment than ever
before to have an active account at GoTo. Yahoo! Yahoo! is just
what you've always heard - the largest single concentration of
web searchers on any search engine or directory. You'll have a
very hard time building your e-empire without traffic from
Yahoo!. The reality is that only a small percentage of free
submissions even get looked at by a staff reviewer at Yahoo! -
the volume is simply too massive to effectively deal with. You
can keep taking your chances for success by submitting and
waiting, submitting and waiting, submitting and... Or, you can
pay the modest $199 US and be guaranteed that your site will be
reviewed within 7 business days. If traffic is your goal, this
is an offer that is too good to refuse. Again, paying the fee
does not guarantee that you will actually be listed in Yahoo!
but your chances are better than submitting and hoping. Bay
9/Rocketlinks Similar in structure to GoTo, Rocketlinks has been
growing steadily over the past few months and is now generating
good traffic flows for many search categories. It has grown so
much that many site owners are reporting it as their lowest cost
source of Pay For Performance traffic. Many very good keywords
can be had for one or two cents per visitor. Rocketlinks has
several new ways for you to participate:Home Page and Contest
Page Featured Listings, Banner Bidding, Cost-Per-Click Banner
Advertising, Email/Newsletter Auctions, Contest Sponsorship and
Email Advertising. I hope this helps in your future marketing
decisions.

About the author:
David Bell is Manager, Online Marketing, at
http://www.wspromotion.com/ , a leading Search Engine
Optimization services firm and Advertising Agency.