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Marketing Tips

USA Today: Business Nets Millions with Top Google Ranking

USA Today reported that Corrugated Metals in Chicago netted "millions and millions of dollars in sales" after investing just $200/month for a top ranking in Google. This intriguing quote appeared in the February 4th article entitled: "For Google, many retailers eagerly jump through hoops"

The article went on to interview a number of businesses, most reporting great successes in both paid Google advertising as well as free top rankings acquired through the process of search engine optimization. Another interesting quote from the article:

"We get 3,000 hits monthly from Google without spending a dime," said ExperiencePlus Tours founder Rick Price. Price goes on to explain how he once spent $100,000 a year on catalogs, postage, and classifieds. According to USA Today, he now spends much of his marketing time updating his site to achieve a top ranking in Google. "We bust our butts to make Google like us," Price says.

How do these people do it? They fine-tune their Web pages to be Google-friendly. However, you must know what the search engine is looking for before you can give it what it wants. Once you do that, your page should jump to the top of the search results, and depending upon the keyword, it can attract thousands of visitors a month.

Of course, the search engines can change the way they rank pages. That means you can sometimes drop in rank as the article warns. Consequently, this requires you to monitor your rankings and to adjust your page when needed.

As many MarketPosition readers know, WebPosition was the first software product in 1997 to assist businesses in tracking their search engine rankings and to help improve those rankings. There's no more proven and more established technology for creating search engine friendly pages.

Search engine marketing is a process and it does take some work. However, as the USA Today article notes, it can be an investment with a significant pay-off and a relatively low cost to entry. That's why this category has been growing in both acceptance and popularity.
Pay-for-Performance

This simply links to pay-per-click advertising options at Overture. Yahoo owns Overture, so this makes sense. For those unfamiliar with Overture.com, you bid for top rankings and the highest bidder receives the highest ranking. The advantage to this model is that you only spend as much as you feel the listing is worth and it's fairly quick and easy to do. There's no need to optimize your page's content so long as the page is relevant to the keywords you are bidding on.

The disadvantage to Overture is that you pay for every visitor you receive which may not be cost effective for all businesses and keyword categories. In addition, these listings only appear on Overture.com, and the Sponsored Results section of Yahoo and its partner sites. Most consumers view these listings as advertisements, which is after all what they are. Therefore, consumers will often skip over these listings in favor of the "real" search results displayed just below them. If they do click on a sponsored listing, they may proceed with a little more skepticism or caution compared to results that were ranked based on merit.

Site Match

Inktomi's paid inclusion program has been replaced by Site Match and for larger customers, Site Match Xchange. These services guarantee your inclusion and a refresh of your page every 48 hours. This means that Yahoo's search engine "spider" will revisit your page every 48 hours and add your latest content to its index. This can be useful if you have content that changes often, or you want to quickly test various page designs to see what will rank best.

I noticed that when I visited their submission page, they advertised a 24-hour refresh. On all other pages I saw, they still say 48 hours. Therefore, they may be planning to move soon to a refresh every 24 hours. For now, I'd assume it could take up to 48 hours until Yahoo corrects the inconsistent wording.

With Site Match, you'll pay a $49 review fee where they will check your page for spam before guaranteeing its inclusion. The review fee decreases per URL based on the number of pages you submit.

Unlike Inktomi, Yahoo now charges new paid inclusion customers 15 cents a click, and for some keywords, you may pay 30 cents or more for the traffic that you actually receive from the listing. If you are an existing Inktomi paid inclusion customer, you will not be required to pay by the click until you renew your listing.

Similar to LookSmart's policy, Site Match is not guaranteeing you a top ranking, nor are they promising you'll receive a single visitor after paying the review fee. It's still up to you to create a search engine friendly page that will be relevant and rise to the top.

Word of caution: Be careful not to submit any pages that could be viewed as spam to Site Match. They claim to have a human-being review every one of these pages for content quality and for spam. They'll also crosscheck that review with various automated checks.

Therefore, Site Match pages will fall under greater scrutiny than free submission pages. Arguably, they probably cannot afford a human appraisal of every change you might make after a live person initially reviews the page. Therefore, the greatest scrutiny will likely occur within the first few weeks of submission.

Your best strategy is to know the rules for what may be classified as spam, and play within those rules both in the short and long run. WebPosition Gold's Page Critic will keep you updated about what each engine views as spam, and for what they are looking for in a top ranking page.

Free Submission

For value-conscious marketers, there may be a silver lining relating to Yahoo's assimilation of Inktomi. Free submission may be playing a more prominent role. Over the past year or more, Inktomi has been phasing out free submissions starting with its own site and followed by its many partner sites. Only one obscure submission page on MSN remained after it was finished. During this time, Inktomi pushed their paid inclusion program almost exclusively.

With the recent changes, Yahoo has restored free submission to their main submission page. You must register your name and some other basic contact data before using it, but it is free.

Is submission even necessary with Yahoo? For most people, the answer is probably no. Do a very specific search on a unique phrase on your page to see if you appear in the index. If you were in the Inktomi index before, you will likely be in the Yahoo database today. In addition, we're seeing evidence that Yahoo is spidering the Web fairly aggressively, including billions of pages for free. They claim to index "several billion pages" now. In fact, Yahoo claims that 99% of its database is comprised of free listings. Therefore, you do not have to pay to be listed in Yahoo.

Like Google, your best strategy should be to establish third party links to your site so the search engine will find you on its own. You'll then not need to worry much about submitting except when you start a new Web site, or where Yahoo appears to be having trouble finding you. It's also a good idea to run a check periodically to make sure one or more of your pages were not lost from the index. WebPosition Gold's Reporter feature can help you with this.

Yahoo Directory

Yahoo's directory listings are where it all started. At one time, these listings appeared prominently in all Yahoo search results. Therefore, when they began charging $299 per year for a site review and possible inclusion in the directory, it was worth it. Today, Yahoo visitors must opt-out of the default search and perform a directory search to find sites listed here. There's no question that people do this, but it's certainly a much smaller percentage of Yahoo's total traffic.

Therefore, inclusion in the Yahoo Directory is not as critical as it once was. However, it can still provide a link to your Web site from a reputable source. Since third-party links play a significant role on other engines, if you can spare the $299, it may still be worth the fee, particularly for less established sites. If your budget is tight, you can still submit to other directories such as Open Directory for free.