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Show Me the Money

Gone - long gone - are the days when you could simply "submit your site" to to the big search engines.

Today, search engines need to show a profit, and most of the major engines expect to be paid for their listings. Google is the exception, and will index and list your pages for free. (Google makes its money from pay-per-click advertising on the Google site.)

Paid listings can be expensive. To submit a single URL to all of the major engines will cost you in the neighborhood of $500!

To reduce costs, I suggest you visit each of the paid search engines (and those that repackage them under a different brand). Rank them based on your their likely appeal to your website audience, and only submit to those you think will deliver.

Are You Missing Links?

The DMOZ and Yahoo directories are relevant because some search engines (notably Google) also evaluate incoming links to your pages when calculating your search engine rank.

If the external "linked from" pages and your "linked to" pages have similar keywords, then your pages will get a boost in search engine rank - for those keywords. The size of the boost depends on the existing page rank of the external pages.

Because Google and other search engines see the DMOZ and Yahoo directories as "important" for the topics they list, links from them to your site will boost your rank for the keywords associated with both your "category" and the actual text of your listings.

The Waiting Game?

After you submit, you can expect results from the paid listing within 48 hours. This makes it easy to check the results, and to "tune" your keyword density or rethink your keyword choices.

For Google submissions, you must wait patiently until the next Google indexing (the "Google dance"). These occur roughly every 30 days. For an informal listing of recent Google dances, see the Google Update History, also on the WebmasterWorld site.

For DMOZ submissions, you just have to wait and see. There is no requirement that they list you, so you may need to try more than one submission to get listed. But don't give up - this directory is worth it. Several search services base their directories on DMOZ.

We'll, that wraps up this introduction to search engine optimization. Please join us in the Search Engine Optimization forum with your questions, comments and suggestions.

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Author:  John Gaffney

John was the president of J. Gaffney Associates, a marketing firm that provided online direct marketing services with a focus on pay-per-click advertising and website search engine optimization.