AltaVista
(Provides results to AltaVista) Purchase at:
http://addurl.altavista.com/
Benefits:
Upon submission, your pages will make it into the AltaVista
index within 2 business days.
Your pages are respidered every 24 hours.
The term of the pay inclusion program is 6 months.
Reporting services are included, such as tracking submissions
and transactions through their online Account Management Center.
The audience reach of AltaVista, according to Nielsen
NetRatings in October 2002, was: AltaVista: 4.4%. Source:
(http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
Cost? $39 for the first URL, and $29 each for 2-10 URL's, then
$19 each for 11 to 500 URLs. So, the total cost for our three
pages for six months would be $97. The cost per year would
be $194.
Downside:
AltaVista's pay inclusion is more expensive than the others, and
AV doesn't have the coverage that some of the other engines have.
Plus, their pay inclusion program is only for six months, as
compared to a full year with the other programs.
So, you'll have to decide whether you feel it's worth the cost.
AltaVista is the one engine where you can still use their free
add URL without being placed into the same category as the huge
group of "free add URL spammers," because AltaVista's free add
URL process doesn't allow mass submissions. Instead, their unique
"puzzle submission" process requires you to enter a submission
code into the submission box, and you can only submit five URLs
at no cost. So, if you want to use free add URL for one of the
engines, AltaVista's is the one to use.
http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new
Total Costs So Far
With our example, considering that this is a brand new Web site
with zero visibility, we'll figure out the cost for our three
pages based on using AltaVista's pay inclusion program and on
not using their program.
Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Without AltaVista:
$221 (for 3 pages)
(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, and Ask
Jeeves. This does NOT include AltaVista.)
Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs With
AltaVista:
$415 (for 3 pages)
(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask
Jeeves, and AltaVista.)
Yahoo!
http://www.yahoo.com
You might be wondering why I haven't listed the Yahoo! directory
in this listing of pay inclusion programs. With the way that
Yahoo! now displays results, which are almost a duplication of
Google results, the importance of submitting to the Yahoo!
directory at a yearly cost of $299 has diminished. Depending on
where things go from here with Yahoo!, having purchased the
Inktomi engine, this is subject to immediate change. But, at
this point in time, paying to be included in the Yahoo! directory
isn't anywhere near as important as it once was. If you have good
visibility in Google, you should have good visibility in Yahoo!.
But, our site is brand new, and the advantage to Yahoo!'s pay
inclusion program is that your site will be reviewed for possible
inclusion within 7 working days. So, depending on our finances,
we may want to add Yahoo!'s pay inclusion costs, just so we can
get fast visibility for our new site.
(According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience
reach of Yahoo! was 28.5%. Source:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs
Including Yahoo!, but not AltaVista: $520
(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask
Jeeves, and Yahoo!. This does NOT include AltaVista.)
Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs
Including both Yahoo! and AltaVista: $714
(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, Ask
Jeeves, Yahoo!, and AltaVista.)
What About Google?
Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Google is the only major engine that doesn't have a pay inclusion
program. So, the only way to get your pages into the index is to
let the spider find the pages on its own through links on other
pages or to submit through Google's free add URL.
Personally, I always let the spider find the pages on its own and
never submit to Google manually. By going this route, while your
site is busy being spidered by the other engines and you're busy
building link popularity, by the time that Google "finds" your
pages, you should have had time to build some link popularity,
which we all know is so important with Google.
According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audience
reach of Google alone was 29.2%. Add to that AOL at 19.7%, Yahoo!
at 28.5%, and Netscape at 5.5%, and it's quite easy to see the
power behind Google. Source:
(http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)
In Conclusion
Rather than worrying about submitting your pages manually to each
of the major engines, take advantage of the tremendous benefits
of using pay inclusion.
Then, let Google find your pages on its own, and hold off
submitting to the Yahoo! directory for a while.
Based on our example here, if we were submitting three pages, our
total yearly cost would be either $221 or $415, depending on
whether or not we chose to use AltaVista's pay inclusion program.
So, as you can see, the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Repeating what I said earlier in this article, the "key" to
successful submissions these days can be summed up in two words:
pay inclusion.
About the Author
Robin Nobles, Director of Training, Academy of Web Specialists,
(http://www.academywebspecialists.com) has trained several
thousand people in her online search engine marketing courses
(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content provider
for (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-
optimizer.com).