The Overlooked Killer App: Paid Inclusion
Don't leave it up to the spiders! Paid inclusion ensures your site will appear in search results. Kevin reviews the four types of paid inclusion programs -- and which is right for you.
Don't leave it up to the spiders! Paid inclusion ensures your site will appear in search results. Kevin reviews the four types of paid inclusion programs -- and which is right for you.
Pay-per-click (PPC) search marketing doesn’t end with the auction-style engines Overture, Google, and FindWhat.com. Search engine spiders can miss much of your site, whether it’s dynamic or static. Paid inclusion ensures your site is “in there” and is a very powerful method of PPC search engine marketing.
Paid inclusion comes in four basic flavors:
Time out! What the heck is an XML feed? XML is a data format representing a landing page URL. Just as a Web page has elements coded into the HTML, XML elements can be represented differently in an XML feed for the page (representing it to the search engine). These elements typically include URL, click-through URL (for tracking), title, description, body copy, and keywords. Each vendor has a slightly different naming convention and specifications for its XML feed, often based on its own database structure and how its algorithm for displaying search results works. Your reseller will tailor XML feeds based on guidelines from each engine.
The typical searcher often uses longer queries. Many contain more than three words. Within three different search engines, keyword distribution data tells a compelling story:
Words in Query | LookSmart (%) | Ask.com (%) | Teoma (%) |
1 | 27.00 | 12.76 | 38.04 |
2 | 33.00 | 22.46 | 29.59 |
3 | 23.00 | 19.34 | 18.13 |
4 | 10.00 | 11.89 | 8.00 |
5 | 7.00* | 7.86 | 3.51 |
6 | – | 6.19 | 1.39 |
7 | – | 5.47 | 0.63 |
8 | – | 4.59 | 0.30 |
9 | – | 3.40 | 0.15 |
10 | – | 2.29 | 0.08 |
LookSmart does not report beyond 5 search terms, instead grouping five or more terms into one category. |
Approximately 40 percent of queries in LookSmart have three or more words. About 32 percent in Teoma have three or more. Ask Jeeves has an even higher skew, nearly 62 percent, because of its natural language focus. Within FAST, the database that powers Lycos and others, the average is 2.5 terms. That suggests a similar frequency distribution to LookSmart and Teoma.
Paid inclusion, particularly XML paid inclusion, is very effective at matching longer queries to Web pages because it contains more information about a page than you could provide Overture or Google.
Which programs are right for you? It depends. The Yahoo annual fee is worth it to just about any business. Predicting ROI on per-URL paid inclusion is more difficult. You never know how many clicks you’ll get for an annual or semiannual fee. Part of how many clicks you get on a URL depends on how search-engine friendly the URL is. Smaller sites should first try per-URL paid inclusion on critical pages to get an idea of traffic volume and quality.
If you have a larger site, providers of XML-based paid inclusion worth considering are Did-it.com (my own company), Inceptor, Position Technologies (Inktomi only), TrafficBoss, TrafficLeader, and Website Results.
Obviously I tend to be biased toward my own service, but each company has its own philosophy, pricing, and technologies. Make an informed decision before selecting any partner, and be clear about your objectives for a paid inclusion campaign. Search engine databases house billions of URLs. Increase the odds of yours being found with paid inclusion.