© 2008 by David Gillaspey (resume). All Rights Reserved.
 
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PART FOUR: other paid listings

Yahoo Express

The article Search engine submission tips from searchenginewatch.com states that the best place to start when paying for submission to search engines is with Yahoo's human-powered directory. According to the article, this is because your site's being listed there greatly increases the likelihood of other web crawlers out there (for other search engines) indexing your site. However, Yahoo's paid listing service — Yahoo Express — costs US$300 per year and they don't even guarantee inclusion, though most listing requests are accepted.

Since Great Church Websites operates on a shoestring budget at the moment, I've had to forego paid Yahoo inclusion. Your church budget may allow you to proceed, however. As mentioned in Part One, I went with the free Yahoo directory listing instead for now.

Other search engines

To promote my site, I have paid to be listed on several other search engines besides Google and Overture et al. I've listed them below. These are for editorial (non-paid) listings, not sponsored (paid) listings as was the case with Google and Overture.

Paying for inclusion, however, is not the same as getting a good ranking. After paying US$75 to be listed with Excite and Dogpile, et al (see below), I was disappointed by my site's ranking on Excite for some popular keywords and search phrases. So I have rewritten the HTML title tags and Description meta tags for all the pages on my website, following my own advice elsewhere in this series. Hopefully this will improve the ranking of my site on Excite for the popular keywords and search phrases, and soon. (The US$75 in total fees guarantees your site gets re-indexed every three days.)

Excite. Cost: US$49.95 per year. If you start here, you'll be given the opportunity to pay extra (US$24.98 as of the time of this writing [July 14, 2004], but that's supposedly a half-off "sale" price) to also be included in the search engine listings of affiliates Dogpile, et al. (See next item.) You'll also be given the opportunity to pay extra for all sorts of add-on features. Skip 'em.

Dogpile/Webcrawler/Verizon/NBC/Metacrawler. Cost: US$49.95 per year. If you start here, you'll be given the opportunity to pay extra (as above) to also be included in the search engine listings of affiliate Excite. You'll also be given the opportunity to pay extra for all sorts of add-on features. Skip 'em.

Teoma. Once independent, Teoma is now owned by Ask Jeaves, one of the major search engines according to the article Major Search Engines from searchenginewatch.com. Teoma's website says it supplies editorial listings to Ask.com (a/k/a Ask Jeeves), Excite, MyWay.com, HotBot.com, Teoma.com (itself), iLor, Ixquick, Search123.com, Metacrawler, MySearch.com and Mamma.com. Half of those I'd never heard of before.

Teoma's website claims that the advantage its search engine has over others is the ability to organize content on the web into online communities of knowledge, resulting in search results that are more relevant.

The price for being listed on Teoma and its partners is reasonable: US$30 per year for one URL, US$18 per URL for each additional URL. (Yes, you read that right. Teoma doesn't offer a quantity discount for multiple URLs; it charges a surcharge. Go figure.)

Signing up for a Teoma account is an eight-step process. The steps are:

1) URL entry. You can enter one to three URLs in this step by default. Click the "Add More URLs" button at the bottom of the page to add more URLs.

2) URL review. In this step, which is misnamed, you just see how much you're going to pay.

3) Terms of Service. Read and agree.

4) Account details. Actually should be called "Contact details." Enter contact name, email address and account password.

5) Contact details. Actually should be called "Account details." Enter company name, address and phone numbers.

6) Billing details. Enter credit card information.

7) Order review.

8) Order complete.

Like Google and Overture, Teoma has an account management area, located here. The first page of the account management area offers summary details about your URL: total click-throughs to your site, unique search terms (unique search terms that resulted in click-throughs to your URL), and average URL rank. These are based on searches conducted on Teoma's website itself as well as that of its affiliates, chief among them being Ask Jeeves and HotBot.

There are four report screens in the account management area that show information about your URL's click-through data, top search terms, etc. Some of the data is shown in chart form (cool!).

The URL to my website was not immediately approved after I completed the sign-up process. According to an email I received shortly after establishing my account, Teoma takes up to seven days to approve URL(s). The Terms of Service mentioned above provides some hints as to what this might entail.

 

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