Search Engine Marketing
Paid Inclusion and Paid Placement
It had to come to this. As the Internet balloon soared, hundreds of search engines filled cyberspace with their databases. Today, the number of true players in the game is but a handful.
For the most part, the days of freely submitting pages/sites to those hundreds of engines (many of which were just email farms anyway) are also gone. Even the legitimate players hardly allow free submission. With the exception of Google (which allows free submissions and more importantly will spider your site on its on) you almost have to pay to be guaranteed inclusion in search engine and directory databases.
In our opinion, this isn't all bad. It is now possible, for a fee, to have your site guaranteed to be included (though not guaranteed placement) in a given search engine index. Spidering times are more frequent, and page changes can be included much more quickly.
Let’s take a look at the two forms of "Pay to Play" for engines and directories.
Pay for Inclusion (PFI)
With PFI, we pay to submit pages (or in the case of directories like Yahoo, the home page of a site) for consideration to be included in the database. There are no guarantees that you will be included, and there are no guarantees where the pages will rank.
With no guarantees, why do we do this? Because if the pages are optimized properly, if there is no spam, if it’s a true site worthy of surfers being able to find it, then it will be included. Furthermore, with your efforts to build the sites with important search terms included in the content, titles, etc., you can be confident the page will rank well. And finally, paid inclusion usually involves guaranteed spidering on a weekly basis. This means new pages and updates get indexed in a timely manner, instead of having to wait for a search engine robot to visit on its terms.
Some of the more popular PFI engines and directories include:
Pay for Placement (PFP) / Pay Per Click (PPC)
Whereas Pay for Inclusion only buys consideration for placement in an engine, Pay for Placement (PFP) allows you to guarantee inclusion and placement. Note: this is not guaranteed ranking among the editorial listings; this is guaranteed placement, usually under a listing of "Sponsored Link" or similar wording.
PFP listings typically appear at the top of a SERP (to the side for Google) before the "free" and/or "PFI" listings. The "Sponsored" tag indicates that a page/site has paid a fee for appearing on a strategically preferable area of a results page that is likely to encourage click-thrus by the searcher.
PFP customers are charged per click-thru to your site, with a minimum monthly fee. These charges can range from 5 cents per click to a much larger amount that you may agree to pay in return for a certain position on the SERP.
Popular PFP/PPC engines and directories include:
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