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In This Issue:
Keep Your
Content Fresh
Most search
engines are designed to place a higher priority on newer material
while dropping older material to the bottom of the
list. When your Web site is first
registered with search engines,
it may be well placed in their priority scheme. You need to
continuously update your material in order to remain high on
the priority list of these search engines.
Internet Tip
Post
comments from 3rd parties on your Web site. A few favorable comments
might be just what you need to raise your credibility and help
consumers select your company.
Is Your Domain Name Optimized?
When first setting up a
business most people will register a domain name that mirrors exactly
the name of their company. While this is certainly important for
directing people to your Web site, many Web site owners do not realize
that a good domain name can help with their search engine ranking.
The Common Mistake
Let's look
at how this can have any impact on a Web site. Joe Smith sets up a Web
site selling plastic widgets and proudly registers the domain name
JoeSmith.com. This is a common practice, especially among smaller
companies or entrepreneurs running their online business from home.
However, Joe should also register a domain name that contains keywords
that relate to the products he sells.
By having
keywords in a domain name, Joe will do a lot more to help his site
rank higher on the search engines than using his own name alone. What
Joe needs to do is also register plastic-widgets.com and have that
domain name point to the same site. A domain name with keywords
imbedded will do wonders not only in achieving higher positioning on
the search engines, but will also be more effective at informing a
potential customer what the Web site sells. Now when a search is
carried out for plastic widgets Joe's Web site is more likely to be
displayed as the domain name contains a match for the searched item.
Yahoo's Annual Fee
Yahoo! is now
requiring that new sites seeking to be listed in its commercial areas
pay an annual listing fee of $299. Previously, the fee had been a
one-time charge. The change transforms Yahoo! from being a Web guide
to an online yellow pages, to some degree.
The distinction is significant. Yahoo!'s commercial listings have
been more editorial than advertising in nature, in that once a site
was approved it was added to the guide and stayed in the guide,
without further charge.
The change to an annual fee reverses the situation with Yahoo!'s
commercial listings, making them far more like advertising than
editorial in nature. As with yellow pages, if an advertiser refuses to
pay the annual Yahoo! listing fee, it will be dropped. That is not
something that happens in an editorial scenario, where sites deemed to
be important are retained, regardless of payments received.
Even Yahoo! acknowledges that the new annual fee pushes its
commercial areas closer to the yellow-pages model, though it does note
that editorial review still plays an important role.
Impact on Site Owners
For site owners, paying the annual fee is still likely to be well
worth the cost. Yahoo! continues to deliver plenty of traffic to Web
sites. Being listed within it remains a must. Just
about everything I read says pay the submission fee, and if you
don't feel you got the value out of it by the end of the year, then
don't renew.
What Happens at Renewal Time?
Shortly before your anniversary date,
you'll receive an email reminding you that it is time to renew. You'll
be able to cancel that way or change your credit card details, in case
your original card has expired.
The annual fee is only charged for sites submitted on or after
December 28, 2001. If you got listed before this, congratulations!
You've escaped the annual fee. Yahoo! wouldn't say as much, but it is
almost certain that sites submitted before December 28 have escaped
the annual fee for legal reasons. After all, when they signed up, the
listing fee was essentially presented as a one-time charge.
Is a Looksmart Rate Increase on the Horizon?
Unfortunately, Looksmart
and Yahoo tend to tag-team each other. What
one does, the other generally follows. Right now Looksmart
charges $299 for their two-day review and $149 for their
eight-week review. You're then in there for
life although they have the right to remove
you if they feel your content is no longer
of acceptable quality.
It's a pretty good bet that
as soon as Looksmart saw Yahoo switch to a
reoccurring fee model that they went to work to
revise their system to accommodate such a reoccurring revenue
plan. For good or bad, all of the engines are looking for
new sources of revenue right now. Yahoo knows that paying
a one-time fee for advertising that lasted essentially forever
was quite a bargain by any standard.
Looksmart will likely
realize the same thing. Although Looksmart.com
does not attract as much traffic as Yahoo.com, Looksmart powers
the directory results of over 370 search engines and ISPs.
Many analysts consider them
to offer comparable exposure to Yahoo (the
most popular of all the engines).
So, if you've been putting
off submitting one or more of your sites to
Looksmart, you'd be money ahead by acting sooner
rather than later. I'm betting that you'll soon see Looksmart
follow suite and start charging $299 every year rather than
just one-time. If you get in now, chances are good that
Looksmart will waive the reoccurring fee for
their existing customers. This could save
you a bundle of money over the coming years.
Not only that, but your listing can appear near the top of
the search results on major
portals like MSN, AltaVista, iWon, CNN, and
others.
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