Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing technique that promotes relevant visitor traffic to your site. In that regard, paid inclusion shares a similarity with search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

With search engine optimization, or SEO, you apply your changes to the website and then wait patiently, sometimes for months, for the search engine spiders to crawl your new pages and update their indexes, before you see the effects. Pay-per-click ads, on the other hand, can deliver visitors to your website in minutes, albeit at a cost per visitor. Paid inclusion occupies the gray area in between. Unlike SEO, there are fees involved. Unlike pay-per-click, results are not instantaneous.

Search Engine Submission Fees and Paid Inclusion Programs
Many search engines now charge a fee when you submit your site to request indexing. Some charge per-page fees. In addition to search engines like Yahoo that require a fee for submitting a commercial website, there are paid inclusion programs that syndicate your submissions across a number of search engines.

There are search engines that charge a submission fee but that stand a good chance of indexing and listing your site eventually regardless of whether you pay or not – the fee simply accelerates the process. There are other search engines that only list paid subscribers. If you don’t pay, you will never be listed. Both types of programs fall under the heading of paid inclusion.

In general, paid inclusion programs are designed to accelerate the slow process of getting your site crawled and indexed by the major search engines so that your pages will be listed in the search results. Some paid inclusion programs make sense for some of our clients. Others are frankly a waste of money. It pays to check your server logs to see if the search engines you are interested in are already crawling your site and, if so, how often.

Some of the search engines that list only paid subscribers base their primary search results on an auction, where the highest bidder for a particular term gets the highest ranking. This approach comes very close to pay-per-click advertising, with the difference that most PPC providers distinguish between paid and unpaid ads.

In summary, there are quite a few players in the search marketing arena. Some can have a much greater impact on your business than others. All are jockeying for position, offering new programs and frequently changing the terms of their existing programs. As a result, the landscape is constantly changing and there are many things to consider before investing. If you don’t have the time to do the necessary homework yourself, you should consider working with a company like Market-Vantage that specializes in this area.

• Planning and Strategy
  
  
• Website Promotion
  
  
• Visitor Conversion Optimization



• Website Visitor Tracking