AltaVista(Provides results to AltaVista) Purchase at:http://addurl.altavista.com/Benefits:* Upon submission, your pages will make it into the AltaVistaindex 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 submissionsand transactions through their online Account Management Center.* The audience reach of AltaVista, according to NielsenNetRatings 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 URLs, then$19 each for 11 to 500 URLs. So, the total cost for our threepages for **six months** would be $97. The cost per year would be $194.Downside:AltaVistas pay inclusion is more expensive than the others, andAV doesnt have the coverage that some of the other engines have.Plus, their pay inclusion program is only for six months, ascompared to a full year with the other programs.So, youll have to decide whether you feel its worth the cost.AltaVista is the one engine where you can still use their freeadd URL without being placed into the same category as the hugegroup of "free add URL spammers," because AltaVistas free addURL process doesnt allow mass submissions. Instead, their unique"puzzle submission" process requires you to enter a submissioncode into the submission box, and you can only submit five URLsat no cost. So, if you want to use free add URL for one of theengines, AltaVistas is the one to use.http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/newTotal Costs So FarWith our example, considering that this is a brand new Web sitewith zero visibility, well figure out the cost for our threepages based on using AltaVistas 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 AskJeeves. This does NOT include AltaVista.)Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs WithAltaVista: $415 (for 3 pages)(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, AskJeeves, and AltaVista.)Yahoo!http://www.yahoo.comYou might be wondering why I havent listed the Yahoo! directoryin this listing of pay inclusion programs. With the way thatYahoo! now displays results, which are almost a duplication ofGoogle results, the importance of submitting to the Yahoo!directory at a yearly cost of $299 has diminished. Depending onwhere things go from here with Yahoo!, having purchased theInktomi engine, this is subject to immediate change. But, at this point in time, paying to be included in the Yahoo! directoryisnt anywhere near as important as it once was. If you have goodvisibility in Google, you should have good visibility in Yahoo!.But, our site is brand new, and the advantage to Yahoo!s payinclusion program is that your site will be reviewed for possibleinclusion within 7 working days. So, depending on our finances,we may want to add Yahoo!s pay inclusion costs, just so we canget fast visibility for our new site.(According to Nielson NetRankings in October 2002, the audiencereach of Yahoo! was 28.5%. Source:http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion CostsIncluding Yahoo!, but not AltaVista: $520(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, AskJeeves, and Yahoo!. This does NOT include AltaVista.)Total of Yearly Pay Inclusion CostsIncluding both Yahoo! and AltaVista: $714(Includes the Inktomi engines, the Fast engines, Teoma, AskJeeves, Yahoo!, and AltaVista.)What About Google?Googlehttp://www.google.com/addurl.htmlGoogle is the only major engine that doesnt have a pay inclusionprogram. So, the only way to get your pages into the index is tolet the spider find the pages on its own through links on otherpages or to submit through Googles free add URL.Personally, I always let the spider find the pages on its own andnever submit to Google manually. By going this route, while yoursite is busy being spidered by the other engines and youre busybuilding link popularity, by the time that Google "finds" yourpages, 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 audiencereach of Google alone was 29.2%. Add to that AOL at 19.7%, Yahoo!at 28.5%, and Netscape at 5.5%, and its quite easy to see thepower behind Google. Source:(http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)In ConclusionRather than worrying about submitting your pages manually to eachof the major engines, take advantage of the tremendous benefitsof using pay inclusion.Then, let Google find your pages on its own, and hold offsubmitting to the Yahoo! directory for a while.Based on our example here, if we were submitting three pages, ourtotal yearly cost would be either $221 or $415, depending onwhether or not we chose to use AltaVistas pay inclusion program.So, as you can see, the benefits far outweigh the costs.Repeating what I said earlier in this article, the "key" tosuccessful 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 severalthousand people in her online search engine marketing courses(http://www.onlinewebtraining.com) and is the content providerfor (GRSeo) Search Engine Optimizer software (http://www.se-optimizer.com).