Now some search engines and directories think that if you want to be included in their listings, you must pay for it!

Does this mean that they will end up with free submissions?

Not necessary.

Search engines need to deliver a good service if they want to be visited. If you design a site that has a very good content, people will want to know about it, and search engines will want to have you on their list. Even if you don't pay a cent per listing!

And if Search engines become too commercialized, people will end up going somewhere else.

A customer wants to find places that deliver good content about the keyword he's looking for, and won't be happy to find many places not so well related to what he's looking for, that are there just because they have paid to be there.

The first thing you must be aware of is that Pay per listing DOES NOT mean that you will be included in Search engine's listings, or that you will receive a shred of traffic!

Pay per listing means that you pay to make them consider including your site, and they will only include it, if your content meets their requirements.

If they include you in their listing, the traffic you will receive will depend on how high your pages rank! So you still have to optimize them to make your keywords and keyword phrases rank high. And you need to do it more than ever because it's costing you money to be listed!

IS IT WORTHWHILE TO PAY PER LISTING (or pay for inclusion)?

If you business isn't on line, it might be the fastest way to get tons of visitors to your site

If you already are on line and your log files tell you that you are already receiving many visitors from Yahoo, then you don't need to pay to be listed with Yahoo

If you used to receive lots of visitors from Yahoo, and somehow you disappear from their listing, it will be very wise to pay to be listed again

You can never know how many visitors you will receive from a search engine if you never appear on their listing

Have you got so many visitors that you don't care if they include you or not? (I think that NO ONE can answer yes to this question).

Bottom line: If you are opening a new business and are short of money, you can try other traffic builders first, but...

If you are really serious about your business...

Pay per listing can be a very good idea!

WHERE SHOULD YOU PAY PER LISTING?

The most important places you should look to be listed are:

* LookSmart: www dot looksmart dot com/ They provide their directory results to: AltaVista, MSN, Excite, CNN and others, and claim to have more traffic than Yahoo.

Is it worth paying for their listing? Considering their size, I think they are.

* Yahoo: www dot yahoo dot com/ It's indeed one of the strongest SE of the Net and I don't think it could be a wise decision NOT to be in it.

* Inktomi: www dot inktomi dot com/ Inktomi provides search services to more than 100 partners, some of them so important as MSN, HotBot, AOL and Answers.

Although you can submit your web site for free to Inktomi through HotBot.com or Canada.com they penalize free submissions with a lower ranking!

If you don't have the money it's better to free submit than to be out of their index, but it's better to let them discover you with their spider (that will give you a higher rank)

Free submissions are deleted from time to time, so if you DO have the money it's better to pay for some of your most popular pages (they charge for each one of them) and see how much traffic you receive.

Another good thing about Inktomi is that if you pay, you will be in their listing in 48 hs.

To submit your web site to Inktomi, you will have to use some of their paid submission partners

* Position Technologies: www dot positiontech dot com/ will charge you $20 for the first page and $ 10 for pages 2-1000

* Network Solutions: www dot networksolutions dot com/en_US/catalog/searchsubmit/ Will charge you $ 30 and $ 15 for similar service, but they will allow you many special services like:

* You can change the URLs on your listings at any time

* You can add new pages and drop other pages

* You can use multiple domains' URLs

At this moment, you can live without the service of other less important paid Search Engines and Directories.

Bottom line: Why should you consider pay per listing? Because otherwise people won't find your site, unless you are the Ford Motors Company or Coca-Cola.

Lets suppose you sell a back massage widget. How will people that DON'T know you find you on the net?

They will go to one of the major Search Engines and make a search for "back massage" or "massages", and you better be included and rank high on those terms if you want them to find you.

So if you are not Coca-Cola, you might want to consider being discovered on The Net.

Written by Dr. Roberto A. Bonomi