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Paid URL Inclusions
Paid
URL Inclusion
(C) Michael Rasmussen
All Rights Reserved
There are many ways to promote your website and one of the most
efficient ways is to use search engines. Search engines are the
first stop for most people trying to find information, services, and
products online. Because of this, it is essential that your website
appears quickly in search results.
The Internet contains numerous search engines, some of which offer
what is known as "paid inclusion." This means that you pay the
specific search engine an annual fee for your web page to be
included in their index.
Of course, every search engine already has an automated program
commonly called a "spider" that indexes all the web pages it locates
online, and it does this for free. So whether you pay or not, your
web page will eventually be indexed by all Internet search engines,
as long as the spider can follow a link to your page. The major
issue is, then, how quickly your page is indexed.
A search engine that offers a paid URL inclusion uses an extra
spider that is programmed to index the particular pages that have
been paid for. The difference between the spider that indexes pages
for free and the spider that indexes only pages for a fee is speed.
If you have paid for inclusion, the additional search engine spider
will index your page immediately.
The debate over paid URL inclusion centers around the annual fee.
Since the regular spider of these search engines would eventually
get around to indexing your web page anyway, why is a renewal fee
necessary? The fee is necessary to keep your pages in the search
engine’s index. If you go the route of paid inclusion, you should be
aware that at the end of the pay period, on some search engines,
your page will be removed from their index for a certain amount of
time.
It’s easy to get confused about whether you would benefit from paid
inclusion since the spider of any search engine will eventually
index your page without the additional cost. There are both
advantages and disadvantages to paid URL inclusion, and it is only
by weighing your pros and cons that you will be able to decide
whether to spring for the extra cash or not.
The advantages are obvious: rapid inclusion and rapid re-indexing.
Paid inclusion means that your pages will be indexed quickly and
added to search results in a very short time after you have paid the
fee. The time difference between when the regular spider will index
your pages and when the paid spider will is a matter of months. The
spider for paid inclusion usually indexes your pages in a day or
two. Be aware that if you have no incoming links to your pages, the
regular spider will never locate them at all.
Additionally, paid inclusion spiders will go back to your pages
often, sometimes even daily. The advantage of this is that you can
update your pages constantly to improve the ranking in which they
appear in search engines, and the paid URL inclusion spider will
show that result in a matter of days.
First and foremost, the disadvantage is the cost. For a ten page
website, the costs of paid URL inclusion range from $170 for
Fast/Lycos to $600 for Altavista, and you have to pay each engine
their annual fee. How relevant the cost factor is will depend on
your company.
Another, and perhaps more important, disadvantage is the limited
reach of paid URL inclusions. The largest search engines, Google,
Yahoo, and AOL, do not offer paid URL inclusion. That means that the
search engines you choose to pay an inclusion fee will amount to a
small fraction of the traffic to your site on a daily basis.
Google usually updates its index every month, and there is no way
you can speed up this process. You will have to wait for the Google
spider to index your new pages no matter how many other search
engines you have paid to update their index daily. Be aware that it
is only after Google updates their index that your pages will show
up in Google, Yahoo, or AOL results.
One way to figure out whether paid URL inclusion is a good deal for
your company is to consider some common factors. First, find out if
search engines have already indexed your pages. To do this, you may
have to enter a number of different keywords, but the quickest way
to find out is to enter your URL address in quotes. If your pages
appear when you enter the URL address but do not appear when you
enter keywords, using paid inclusion will not be beneficial. This is
because your pages have already been indexed and ranked by the
regular spider. If this is the case, your money would be better
spent by updating your pages to improve your ranking in search
results. Once you accomplish this, you can then consider using paid
inclusion if you want to speed up the time it will take for the
regular spider to revisit your pages.
The most important factor in deciding whether to use paid URL
inclusion is to decide if it’s a good investment. To figure this
out, you have to look at the overall picture: what kind of product
or service are you selling and how much traffic are you dependent on
to see a profit?
If your company sells an inexpensive product that requires a large
volume of traffic to your site, paid inclusion may not be the best
investment for you; the biggest search engines do not offer it, and
they are the engines that will bring you the majority of hits. On
the other hand, if you have a business that offers an expensive
service or product and requires a certain quality of traffic to your
site, a paid URL inclusion is most likely an excellent investment.
Another factor is whether or not your pages are updated frequently.
If the content changes on a daily or weekly basis, paid inclusion
will insure that your new pages are indexed often and quickly. The
new content is indexed by the paid spider and then appears when new
relevant keywords are entered in the search engines. Using paid
inclusion in this case will guarantee that your pages are being
indexed in a timely manner.
You should also base your decision on whether or not your pages are
dynamically generated. These types of pages are often difficult for
regular spiders to locate and index. Paying to include the most
important pages of a dynamically generated website will insure that
the paid spider will index them.
Sometimes a regular spider will drop pages from its search engine,
although these pages usually reappear in a few months. There are a
number of reasons why this can happen, but by using paid URL
inclusion, you will avoid the possibility. Paid URL inclusion
guarantees that your pages are indexed, and if they are
inadvertently dropped, the search engine will be on the lookout to
locate them immediately.
As you can see, there are numerous factors to consider when it comes
to paid URL inclusion. It can be a valuable investment depending on
your situation. Evaluate your business needs and your website to
determine if paid URL inclusion is a wise investment for your
business goals.
Michael Rasmussen is a successful Internet Marketing Consultant and
author of many top-selling eBooks. Michael has been marketing online
since the early days and he knows what it takes to make money and
succeed online. Stop by his Web site and subscribe to his Free
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