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Internet
Marketing Tip of the Month
News Alert: Search Engine
Opportunities!
February, 2001
By
Cassandra Tabora
Internet Marketing Specialist
Recent
changes in submitting websites for listings in search engines is good news for
companies looking to aggressively promote their sites. A few leading directories
such as Yahoo! and LookSmart now charge a fee for submission in exchange for a
guaranteed review for listing. The upside is that you get listed quicker and
have opportunities for more prominent listings as well. These search engine's
category editors will review your site in as little as 48 hours and make sure
that your site has proper placement within their directory. As a result, you can
now ensure prompt and proper placement for your site. Following are details on a
few major search engines:
Yahoo!'s
paid submission into their national "Business and Economy"
categories is now mandatory to get your site listed, but regional categories
are still free. As a result:
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Yahoo!
will have fewer; better listings.
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You
are more likely to get listed in the category you requested.
-
A
category editor that will review your site in as little as 48 hours.
Yahoo
now also offers "Sponsored Listings" that appear in a box above the
regular listings when viewing a category. See an example of a sponsored listing now.
AltaVista
has included another dimension to their search results with "Sponsored
Listings" that appear below the regular results. These results are from
GoTo.com's pay-per-click system, which you have the option to join.
NBCi
has joined the league of paid listings with their "Promote" feature
for any site that allows you to upgrade your free listing to their "Top
Sites Directory" to have higher rankings.
For
most commercial sites, we would highly suggest looking into at least one or two
of the paid submission options. Our experience is that Yahoo! is the best search
engine for referring qualified leads, and it is the top search engine in the
U.S. Another good one to invest in is LookSmart since it powers so many of the
other major search engines such as AltaVista, MSN, Excite, IWon and CNN.com.
According to LookSmart, the combined traffic for these engines is about 83
percent of all U.S. Internet users. As for MSN, they have partnered solely with
LookSmart and they no longer allow free submissions.
Contact Dynamics Online to review your search engine
status or for help in submitting or verifying your listings, especially if it
has been more than one year since your site's listings were verified.
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