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SEO (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)ARTICLES
Paid Inclusion - Is It Worth $39 to be found
on MSN Search?
Should You Invest $39 for More Traffic?
I don't usually recommend my clients spend any money
on search engine placement, but I may be about to
change my mind.
For just $39 you can get listed in the third most
popular search engine within 72 hours.
So why choose this option above competing payment
plans from Yahoo, Overture and others? To answer
that we have to have a little background information.
Determine Your Strongest Keywords
One of the keys to high placement in search
engine listings is the proper use of keywords within
the text of the page as well as the code. Keywords
are phrases typed into search engines when someone
is searching for a list of businesses in your category.
Choosing the strongest keyword phrase for a give
page is therefore a critical part of optimizing
your site for the search engines.
The tool I use most often to help a client choose
strong keywords is WordTracker.
WordTracker tracks how often a keyword was typed
into all the search engines for the last 60 days.
After it helps you expand your keyword list it can
show you how often any word or phrase was searched
on in the last 2 months.
Now you might guess that a keyword searched on 5,000
times in the recent past would be a better choice
than one that was only searched on 150 times. However,
the critical factor is how many competing web sites
have that phrase in use as well.
So if the phrase that is searched on 5,000 times
has 100,000 web sites that match, it might not be
as good as the lower one if it has only 25 competing
sites.
Why KEI is Important to You
WordTracker uses a formula to calculate the Keyword
Effectiveness Index (KEI) for your keywords. It's
based on the relationship between the number of
times a phrase is searched on and how many competing
sites contain the same phrase. You want to find
keyword phrases that get a lot of searches, but
have relatively few competing sites.
Keywords that have a KEI of less than 10 are so
competitive it's very tough to get a high ranking.
Keywords that rate a score from 11-100 are promising
phrases for your site. If you can create a keyword
phrase that scores between 100 and 400, but sure
to use it! WordTracker says any keyword with a KEI
above 400 is "a gift."
The Surprising Search Engine
When you look at the KEIs produced by the different
search engines, something really pops out. Given
the same keyword phrase, the KEIs in MSN Search
are often much higher than in Google and Yahoo.
Here's an example from a recent client. In Google,
the phrase "life coach" rated a KEI of
3.175, hardly worth considering. Google has 58,500
sites with that phrase in its data base.
On the other hand, MSN Search only lists 29 sites
with "life coach" on their pages. That's
why the KEI is 6,405.552. So for this phrase, you
definitely want to be in MSN Search because there's
virtually no competition.
MSN Search only gets 12% of the search engine traffic
compared to Yahoo's 33% and Google's 35%. However,
that 12% represents 39 million searches a day, not
too shabby in my book.
Pay to Play
You can try the free submission to MSN
Search, but they don't sound too encouraging
about your chances of getting listed within 60 days
if at all. You can also pay Inktomi
a yearly charge of $39 for your first page and $25
for subsequent pages and get listed in MSN Search
and several others within 72 hours .
Yahoo charges $299 a year to be considered for admission,
and Pay per Click services like Overture can churn
through a lot of money in a hurry. Thirty-nine bucks
sounds like a deal if you're cautiously dipping
a toe into this area of search engine marketing.
Tune Up Your Pages
Of course getting listed in the search engines is
only the start. If you're not on the first two pages
of a search, you don't exist. So make sure that
each page you submit is optimized for a specific
keyword phrase.
If your site features a lot of content for your
visitors, just give each topic its own page and
keywords and you'll have multiple ways for people
to get into your web site.
Conclusion
For just $39 you can get at least one page of your
site into an arena with minimal competition. This
is the least expensive search engine payment option
and seems to hold the possibility of a high ranking
for your site.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Les Goss is President of ZebraMoon Design, Inc.
To see a partial list of high-ranking web sites
we've created for our clients, please visit our
web site at http://www.zmoon.com.
For more suggestions on optimizing your pages, see
my article (http://www.zmoon.com/articles/home_page.shtml).
Good luck!
Sign up for our free newsletter at http://www.zmoon.com/webdesigntips.html
You'll receive two issues a month on topics that
should help you stay a step ahead of your competition.
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