Well it's that time of year again! It's time to sort out the changes that have been affecting the search engine world and update your links on where and how to submit your pages. Summer is a great time of the year to review your search engine marketing campaigns and formulate a plan of action that will set you up for a Fall full of profits.
Let's start out with a general update of who is powering whom. There have been a number of big business acquisitions in the past year, mostly centered on multi million dollar purchases by Yahoo and Overture. The competition for search engine properties and search traffic has resulted in a generalized compression of places webmasters can mine traffic for free. Here is an overview as of June 2004:
Yahoo
Web Search Results Powered By: Yahoo Crawler (Yahoo! Slurp)
Directory Results Powered By: Yahoo Directory
Sponsored Listings Powered By: Overture
Currently Owns: Yahoo, Overture, All The Web (FAST Search), Altavista, Inktomi
Submit for free Here (Login)
Google
Web Search Results Powered By: Google
Directory Results Powered By: Open Directory (DMOZ.org)
Sponsored Listings Powered By: Google Adwords
Currently Owns: Google
Submit for free Here
MSN
Web Search Results Powered By: MSN Bot / Inktomi
Directory Results Powered By: Open Directory (DMOZ.org)
Sponsored Listings Powered By: Overture
Currently Owns: MSN
Submit for free Here
Lycos
Web Search Results Powered By: FAST
Directory Results Powered By: Open Directory (DMOZ.org)
Sponsored Listings Powered By: FindWhat, Google Adwords
Currently Owns: HotBot, Tripod, Angelfire, Gamesville
Submission Administration
AOL Search & Netscape
Web Search Results Powered By: Google
Directory Results Powered By: Open Directory (DMOZ.org)
Sponsored Listings Powered By: Google Adwords
Submit for free Here
Others:
Entireweb.com
Geocities.com
Paid Submission Overview
Overture's Content Match (Sponsored or Ad displayed listings)
Powers: Yahoo, All The Web (FAST Search), Altavista, InfoSpace, MSN, Excite, Go2Net, Sympatico.ca (View All)
Audience: 170 million per month
Minimum Cost per Click: $0.10
Minimum Monthly Spending Allowance: $20.00
Required initial deposit: $50.00
Yahoo's Overture SiteMatch (Integrated Search Results Listings)
Minimum Bid (CPC): .15 or .30c depending on type of traffic
Annual Listing Fee: $49/year for the first URL, $29 for URLs 2-10 and $10 for 11+ URLs submitted for the same site.
More information
Google Adwords
Powers: AOL, Netscape, AskJeeves, Earthlink, Lycos.com and many more
Minimum Cost per Click: $0.05
Minimum Monthly Spending Allowance: None
Required initial deposit: $5.00
More Information
FindWhat
Powers: CNET's Search.com, Excite, Webcrawler, NBCi, MetaCrawler, Dogpile, Go2Net
Minimum Cost per Click: $0.01
Minimum Monthly Spending Allowance: None
Required initial deposit: $50.00
More Information
Others:
Kanoodle.com
7search.com
Epilot.com
Untitled Page
Taking a look at this brief overview it's easy to tell the direction search traffic has been heading over the past year - Pay to Play is the name of the game. Cheap search traffic is out there, check out Find What's 1 cent per click minimum, however to get front and center to the largest internet audiences, we as marketers must make sure the keywords which we select for paid campaigns are extraordinarily targeted in order to protect our budgets and overall bottom lines.
This same lesson in keyword selection and traffic targeting is a theme I have repeated in numerous Traffic Lessons on search engine marketing - we can no longer afford to waste time creating optimized pages that flood the engines with irrelevant information simply just to drive a few extra clicks to our sites. If this continues, the trend of paying for performance will only increase as search engines battle to protect the integrity of their results to stay competitive. By keeping your free traffic optimization efforts more relevant, as well as you paid placement and paid inclusion optimization, customers walk into your site more invited, less frustrated, and more ready to buy.
Keep your chins up, there are still places with millions of searches every day which you can optimize your site and submit to for free traffic. Just remember to give both the engines and their visitors what they want - clean, relevant, quality results (your site) and the relationship between surfer, site and search engine will continue to remain an open path on the information super highway where not every road needs to be a toll road. Support your favorite engines and let them know what they are doing right. As 2004 rolls towards a close, let's hope a Google IPO spells only success along the trends it has been built upon, and that underdogs like MSN and Lycos can once again emerge as viable competitors and help rise to the fight against the Yahoo/Overture acquisition and search traffic compacting machines they have become.
Stay positive, stay informed, and keep it targeted! I'll be here with you along the way - Until then, Happy Promoting!