Chapter 10 How to Pull Traffic to Your Collection SiteHow do you pull visitors into your site? How do you let potential prospects know you exist? Go where your perfect customer is looking for you. Without big business brand recognition, your customer is forced to look for you. Where do they look for you? Well, they do not actually look for you; they query search engines, search portals and web directories for information that allows them to solve their own problems. Making sure that your website shows up in the first couple of pages when they search is the key ingredient to pulling your visitors to your main theme site. Getting this traffic gives you the opportunity to capture e-mail addresses and build your list. How do you get your web pages into these engines and directories? More importantly, what should you submit to these engines and what will they show the visitors who are searching? Search EnginesWhat is a search engine? A search engine is a group or collection of web applications that has a number of specific jobs. Search engines can:
Many search engines are advertised. There are only 6 that you need to worry about. Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, Alltheweb(FAST), Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves. Key Point! Many search engines are advertised. There are only 6 that you need to worry about. Google, Inktomi, AltaVista, Alltheweb(FAST), Direct Hit and Ask Jeeves. Search Engine Portal A search engine portal is similar to a search engine except it does not use its own spider to check Internet pages or documents. What it does do is provide a way to query other search engine indexes. The major search engine portals include AOL Search, MSN Search, Lycos. Directories A website directory is different from a search engine. A directory is a list of websites checked and edited by real people. A directory is organized into categories, topics and subtopics. Many of the directories supplement their listings with additional pages from search engines. The major directories include Yahoo, DMOZ (Open Directory Project) and LookSmart. Pay-Per-Click Search Engines PPC or Pay-For-Placement, Cost-Per-Click are some other terms you may hear or see that refer to search engines that differ from a traditional search engine in a number of ways.
The major PPC Search engines are Overture (formerly GOTO), 7Search, FindWhat, and Sprinks. Getting ListedWith so many different places to get listed it makes you wonder where you should start. Obviously, you would like to get listed in every search engine, directory, search portal, and PPC search engine but which one should you do first? Key Point! Move PPC (Pay-Per-Click) to the back of the list. Because you can target the PPC search engines specifically to your keywords a small business is better to use their limited budget to send any clicks directly to their mini-sites. The purpose of the theme information site is to collect e-mail addresses; the mini-site is to earn money. You can set a direct budget for the number of visitors directly sent to your sales page. If you have the budget for a pay-per-click search engine spend it and track the number of sales you are getting. This is the marketers dream since you get a direct measure of your investment. You spend money for a certain number of clicks, you know exactly how many of those visitors bought, and how much you paid for each visitor. Test and redo your pages and the cost for each visitor until you make money. Come back to the PPC search engines after you have submitted to the others. Because so many of the engines, directories and portals are interconnected, there are some advantages in submitting to each in a set order.
How to Submit If you are responsible for ensuring that your website is prominently placed in the major search engines, then you will want to familiarize yourself with the many paid inclusion services being offered. Paid inclusion is not to be confused with pay-per-click search (Overture, Findwhat), which offers sponsored positions in return for a charge each time someone clicks on your website's link. Nor does paid inclusion promise that your website will be at the top of the search engine results. Paid inclusion simply provides an opportunity for a website to be indexed by a search engine on a more frequent basis, typically two to seven days. If paid inclusion does not promise higher positioning on a search engine, then what are the benefits for the search engine marketer? Well, until the introduction of paid inclusion, it would take a search engine anywhere from four to 10 weeks to refresh its index of websites. The Internet had simply become too vast for the average search engine to visit new sites and add them to the index on a more frequent basis. This slowdown meant that most search engine marketers would have to wait months before seeing if the changes made to a website would impact on their search engine positioning. If the changes were effective, that s great. If they were not, it would mean going back to the drawing board and then suffering another agonizingly long wait for the next update. The entire process would take up to six months, with each passing day resulting in more lost revenue. Paid inclusion, while still in its infancy, provides a search engine marketer with a comparably rapid reaction by the search engines to the changes made at a website. With refresh rates of anywhere from 48 hours with Inktomi and Lycos to seven days with AltaVista, results can be seen quickly. It is now possible to review your current positioning on a website, make changes to your content and then review your results all in the same week. Adding a new product? Thinking of changing the layout of your homepage? With paid inclusion, you can now make the changes to your website and see the impact on the search engines within a few days. It is this rapid turnaround that makes paid inclusion such an obvious choice for people who want to make changes to their website on a regular basis. So with all of the benefits that paid inclusion brings, you might think that the cost would be too prohibitive for the average website owner. Well, you will be pleased to know that the cost of paid inclusion is very reasonable considering the benefits. The average cost for ensuring rapid inclusion and fast refresh rates is around $30 per year, per URL. While this can be expensive if you have hundreds of pages on your website (paid inclusion only benefits the page you designate, it does not spider the remainder of your site), it makes sense to at least include your home page, and your Site Map. In addition, most of the search engines that offer paid inclusion also offer multiple page discounts. Submit: Key Point! Whether tweaking your search engine positioning or ensuring that your new products are indexed, paid inclusion becomes a valuable marketing ally. As search engines look for new methods of generating income, you can be sure that others will follow with their own versions of paid inclusion. While many website owners will remain content with the "free submission" and lengthy wait for their site to be indexed, it is clear that if your website is a channel for revenue, you will want to use paid inclusion. Getting Ready to Submit - Do your homework before submitting. Make sure the site is ready. This is especially true for the directories where a real person is going to check your site out before it gets listed. 
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