Top 10 SEO myths
Myth and misconception No. 2: Pay to be listed
"The only way to get traffic is to pay and pay and pay"
This article is accurate as/of January 10, 2003
CORRECTION:
With Overture paid listings showing up on some Internet search engines and portals,
Yahoo charging a US $ 299 annual review fee for commercial listings in their directory,
and also many search engines asking a fee to be incorporated in their index, GCIS has found
that many webmasters and site owners with limited budgets often worry a lot of ever
getting listed, let alone ranking well in the major engines.
Additionally, as some have found out over time, they realize that their costs for such programs can rapidly go over budget very fast. As this article was being written, rates for PTBL (Pay to be listed) programs were being increased at most PTBL sites. Additionally, the general feeling among some search industry observers is that trend will probably continue over the coming months and years. An example to this is Looksmart: they have changed and modified their rate structure three times in 2002 alone. In some other but similar cases, we have seen some instances where customers that had already fully paid for a PTBL program in the past were dropped completely from the index some months later, as those engines later modified their PTBL program. In cases like these, we are not talking about an investment, but rather a wasted expenditure.
There could be a few instances in how a company can attempt to speed up its Web listings by paying for a review or inclusion, but the fact is, numbers and statistics have consistently proven us and our clients that good old fashioned SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and extra hard work can get you there as well, if not much better. Speed isn't everything. The most important thing in SEO is quality referrals. Would you rather have 2,000 visitors a day to your site and no sales, because those visitors landed up on your site by clicking a link from a pay-as-you-go type engine or, just 50 qualified and targeted visitors that entered a specific keyword for your industry and are really interested in the products and services your company has to offer ?
Additionally, one more positive benefit to SEO is, it will usually cost a lot less, especially after three months, when most of your SEO investment starts paying off and you start seeing a lot of targeted, qualified traffic to your site. More importantly, a high-quality SEO program done by professionals usually needs to be done only once. With a PTBL (Pay to be listed) program, as the words imply, you have to keep paying all the time ! With a quality SEO program, if the products and services in your industry don't change that much, you pay once (the first time) and that's it. If you happen to be in a field where some of your products or services do change a bit over time, your initial SEO program can be fine-tuned to reflect those changes. At any rate, the additional fee involved would represent a very small percentage of the original fee the first time you had your site optimized. Over time, if you have new products or services to add to your site, the same applies.
Studies show that most Web surfers bypass paid listings
Here are more facts and considerations before you make any decision on SEO:
Number one, let's take the Overture and other PTBL (Pay to be listed) results off
the ground. Although these ads can bring some amount of traffic to a site, serious
independent studies have shown that the majority of Web surfers bypass paid listings
altogether in favor of the standard and, at times, better & more in-depth search
results. In that case, the challenge is to get optimized as a priority in the major
search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Alta-Vista, Teoma... etc. The only way to get
that result is to hire a professional firm and
invest in a serious, and well-planned SEO program.
Many search engines have some type of "add url" feature. Ignore them. Serious major search engines find and add sites to their index with their automated crawlers (spiders) such as Googlebot (in the case of Google) and by following links on other web sites. Experience has shown us that, although submitting your URL may make you feel better, it's unlikely to result in a great listing. Instead, invest your time in finding relevant sites that might wish to link to yours. Ask the webmasters of those sites for a link, and where appropriate, link to them in return. The key to remember here is relevancy: make sure that their web site has something basic and of value to your visitors. For example, Google will give much higher marks and rank a site higher if links pointing to it are relevant.
Google and link popularity
As the number of incoming
links to your site begins to grow, the spiders will naturally find their way to your
site and index it. Since most search engines, especially Google, now include link
popularity as part of their ranking algorithm, experience has taught us that allowing
the spiders to find you this way will often result in a much higher ranking. The only
way to achieve these results is to have your site
optimized in the first place. Also, the very way in wich
your text pages interface with each other has a lot to do with your final results.
What we have been doing to maximize results is to write the pages in an orderly way
that will help search engines find the most important information that your visitors
want to find.
Over the years, experience has proven us that the exact content on your pages will make a big difference in the major search engines. We also pay a lot of attention to the exact keywords used, as they have an increasing importance in the overall results. The only way to get a much higher, prioritized ranking in those major search engines is to invest in a quality SEO program done by professionals. Contact GCIS.
Click here for additional important facts on Internet search engines.
Bring a lot more potential customers to your Web site with our award-winning Pagina+™ SEO service and priority site positioner solution. Pagina+™ is now in it's 2.0 version.
Click here for all the information on effective SEO keyword searches.
If you need complete and updated information on any Internet technology subject, we strongly suggest you bookmark our site address: www.gcis.ca or better still, make it your default Home Page start-up address in your Internet browser.
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