When I first began submitting to search engines in early 1995, there were just about four of them, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Infoseek and Magellan. Soon there were hundreds of search engines and indexes out there on the web, but the vast majority of traffic coming to most sites was referred from a few top tier Indexes. Today it's all about being found in Google, Yahoo, and then MSN. Many of the other branded search engines use search technology and the lists developed by third party companies such as Google Look Smart and Inktomi. In addition, there are some web indexes such as the Netscape Open Directory, which helps power the AOL searches, which are important sources of traffic.

Search engine optimization, is a class of service all by itself,. Search engine optimization actually is a marketing service more than a web design service, although design plays a big part in search engine placement. At AAA we understand a little more than just the basics of search engine success. We also understand search engine indexing is a moving target challenge that is changing all the time.

The name of the search engine game is exposure for SPECIFIC keyword searches, which pertain to the content on your web site and the search engine companies know this. In fact what used to be a free service, submission of pages to their indexes is now a revenue center for many of the big indexes. They are now charging for businesses to submit to their index. Yahoo, Looksmart and Microsoft Network (MSN) have begun to CHARGE up to $299.00 EACH for business web address express submissions. That means if you are a business with a web site that wants to be listed in Yahoo, they will charge $299.00 for a REVIEW of your web site within 48 hours. Yahoo recently changed the fee to a YEARLY RECURRING charge of $299 if your site is accepted. You pay your fees, but there is no guarantee that the site will even be included, let a lone at the top, in the index.

If you don’t pay, the site can still be submitted to some search engines, but your site will get in line with the other 10,000 or 100,000 submissions received that day or week. Another of the first tier indexes, MSN, now appears to be NOT accepting ANY submissions from commercial web sites, UNLESS they pay a fee, a no guarantee review fee. Many other search engines have followed suit.

This PAY-TO-SUBMIT factor means search engine placement is going to be a greater additional cost component for ANY web site planning on using search engines for traffic building. That is a lot of competition for top listings in the search engines. After 6 to 8 weeks if your URL does not appear in the search engines such as Altavista and Lycos from specific searches you recommended to us and paid to be optimized for, re-submission is recommended.

Right now it is all about Pay-Per-Click advertising. Google Ad Words is the largest of these sponsored site listings followed by Yahoo and MSN. The Google model allows you to sign up for an Ad Words account choose the monthly budget to spend, the key words or phrases you want to advertise on, then you bid on a Pay Per Click basis usually beginning at a low 25 cents per click to a cost of several dollars per click. The amount you bid determines on where your ad show up in the space on top or column to the right of any search results marked Sponsored Links. You are only charged when someone clicks through to your from the text ad you bid on. BUT if you have a real succeful Ad Word promotion and a web site that has too low of a conversion rate of click throughs to sales, then you will be loosing money. Successful Ad Word promotion is finding the cost per click that gets your site exposed AND clicked on, while converting visitors to buyers. W can help you do that.

Our final word on search engine and directory placement and promotion is this:

We make NO specific representation as to how soon your web site will appear in the search engines. And without using pay-to-submit methods, if your site will even be included in any index. How close to the top of any key word search your site will be listed is another moving target using submission only methods. Ad Word type campaigns will help your site be found but could cost from several hundred to thousands of doalrs a month. Search engine research, optimization, submissions and monitoring are all done as hourly shop rates. For a small web project of $500 to $1,000, these services can add 20 to 35% or even more of the over all cost to the project. In my experience, anyone who does promise SPECIFIC placement results (LIKE we’ll get your site to the TOP or #10 or better) on any search engine for any specific keyword searches is suspect, at best.

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