Search engine paid inclusions. Are they worth it?

What is paid inclusion? Should you spend money on paid inclusion? If you decided to pay for inclusion, which service to choose? Use professional search engine submission or do it yourself?

Once created and optimized your web site, you need start working on the submission of the web site to the search engines so that potential visitors actually find it. You can read more in more details about submission to global search engines in our article"Search Engine Submission Tips"

You probably know by now that after you submit your website to the search engines, it might take weeks or even moths before your site will actually be included in the search results. But these days, most of the major search engines have paid inclusion service. With paid inclusions your site will be listed within 48 hours to 7 days (different search engines offer different time limits). The other advantages of paid inclusion is that your listing will be refreshed regularly, i.e. if you optimize your page later on you'll see the results in few days and not in few months as it would be if you would use normal submit.

The question is if search engine paid inclusion is worth or it is just a waste of money? There is probably no absolute answer for every website. The calculation of whether paid website submission is cost effective would be very simple. If you paid $40 per year and this listing brought you 100 visitors, and you have on average one of 20 visitors converting to customer with profit of $20 each, then you got 5 customers bringing you $100 profit. So in this case paid listing paid off. Of course it would be hard to predict how many visitors can be brought by this listings, but here is optimization of your pages can help. If you optimize your web pages properly then there is a much better chance that your listing will come up in the results more often.

So using paid inclusion to drive some immediate traffic to your web site while you wait for free indexing can be a great way to gain exposure for your site in the short term, but it can become expensive if you use it as a long-term traffic solution, especially if your site is non-commercial.


If I decided to pay, which search engines should I choose to pay for submission?

You should only consider submission to global search engines, such as Yahoo, Altavista, HotBot, Inktomi, Looksmart, MSN, whatUseek, WebWombat, Slider. Each of this engines have different pricing and conditions for inclusion. Using professional search engine submission service might help you save your time (by checking all possible options and submitting in one go) and money (because professional search engine submission services often get discounts from search engines).

There are many services offering to do web site submission for you, but I would recommend searching for reliable service, which you can control yourself, like for example - Search Engine Priority Submit service of Trellian. PrioritySubmit has partnered with the major engines to offer a priority listing service. It is legitimate and reliable. Also as part of the service, you will receive weekly click-through and position reports, so that you can monitor the success of your page. This will enable you to fine tune your page by making appropriate changes to your page description and keywords. Available on the Inktomi powered search engines, such as: About, Corporate Yahoo, GOO, HotBot, MSN and many others. You can choose only one or two search engines to submit to and add more later if results are good. So you can give it a try and see the rusults