Affordable Search Engine Placement

Despite the rise in "paid participation" programs offered by search engines, affordable search engine submission is still possible. However, using the paid programs that are offered will speed up the listing process and almost certainly generate more search engine related traffic for your web site.

Given this, it is highly recommended that any site owner establish a search engine submission budget. This is true whether you are running a commercial web site, a "hobbyist" site in your own time or a site for a non-profit organization.

The Minimum Budget: Yahoo

How much to budget? At minimum, you MAY want to cover submission to Yahoo's human-compiled directory for one year. This is because the flat $300 annual fee that Yahoo charges may help ensure that major crawler-based search engines pick up your home page quickly.

Huh? Pay to be in human-compiled results in hopes of influencing crawlers? Crawlers analyze links from across the web to decide which pages they should pick up and potentially rank well. Being listed in Yahoo's human-compiled directory is potentially one of the best links you can gain, to influence crawlers.

It may be that crawlers will find your page and perhaps rank it well even without the benefit of a Yahoo link. So if money is tight, wait two or three months after you launch your site and see how you do. If you still aren't doing well with crawlers, then spending the money with Yahoo may help you.

 Search engines are one of the primary ways that Internet users find web sites. That's why a web site with good search engine listings may see a dramatic increase in traffic.

Everyone wants those good listings. Unfortunately, many web sites appear poorly in search engine rankings or may not be listed at all because they fail to consider how search engines work.

In particular, submitting to search engines  is only part of the challenge of getting good search engine positioning. It's also important to prepare a web site through "search engine optimization."

Search engine optimization means ensuring that your web pages are accessible to search engines and focused in ways that help improve the chances they will be found.

This next section provides information, techniques and a good grounding in the basics of search engine optimization. By using this information where appropriate, you may tap into visitors who previously missed your site.

The guide is not a primer on ways to trick or "spam" the search engines. In fact, there aren't "search engine secrets" that will guarantee a top listing. But there are a number of small changes you can make that can sometimes produce big results.

Let's go forward and explore first the two major ways search engines get their listings, then see how search engine optimization can especially help with crawler-based search engines.