2004: The Year Of Paid Search Engine Marketing By Sage Peterson April 2004
The first-ever 4-day Search Engine Strategies conference just concluded in NYC. The talk of the show was an announcement by Yahoo! that set
the tone, not just for the show, but for the industry for this year.
During the conference, Yahoo! announced its new paid inclusion program that combines submissions to Yahoo, Inktomi, AltaVista and
AllTheWeb.com. Make no mistake, 2004 is the year of paid search engine marketing.
Though optimizing your Web pages for top ranking is more important than ever, you will most likely be paying to have them included in the
searchable indexes of most of the major search engines with the exception of Google.
If you think you cannot afford to pay, don't worry, the search engines still operate a "free crawler" that will eventually find many of your
Web pages, just like before. However, if you need all of your content indexed, if your content changes frequently, if you operate an
especially large Web site or if your Web site is dynamically generated and therefore difficult for a search engine crawler to index, your
participation in paid inclusion programs is important.
And while this may be a challenge for some, don't worry. As Martha Stewart might say, it's a good thing. Yes, you will be paying more money
for your traffic, but you will have more control and more marketing data.
In exchange for your inclusion fees you get something that most people have never experienced before with search engines: customer support Ð
the search engines will actually take your call and work with you to resolve problems with your search engine listings (maybe your site is
described poorly as "contact-us, about-us, jobs" instead of a description of your offering). Some other advantages of a paid inclusion program
include:
Reports -- you receive detailed reports on how many clicks your pages received
Tracking -- you have the ability to track through a third party tracking tool
Indexing Speed -- you can get your content into the index quickly and its guaranteed to be included
Refresh Speed -- you have the ability to refresh content quickly, get "special promotions" into the search engines and then remove them when they are over almost immediately
But here's what most marketers need to remember: paying for inclusion is not paying for ranking. You still need to optimize your Web pages in
order to gain a high ranking.
And though many of you may only be thinking of all of the additionally costs you will soon incur, know that paid inclusion is one of the
fastest ways to gain solid, relevant traffic from search engines when you are working with a search engine marketing firm who manages the feed
and ensures that the top rankings are achieved.
