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Pay-Per-Inclusion
(PPI)
Pay-per-inclusion
(PPI) differs vastly from Pay-per-click (PPC) search engines
and directories. In PPI directories, such as Yahoo, you
pay a yearly fee just to be included into their directory.
Pay-per-inclusion gets websites no special preferences in
the directory rankings and in the case of Yahoo, you are
at the mercy of an editor to give you a keyword-friendly
title and description on which your ranking will be determined.
The upside of Yahoo is that if your website is not deceptive
(doorway pages, mirrors or redirects) chances are very good
that the website will be listed.
Once the overall
search leader, Yahoo has fallen way behind Google in popularity
(but who hasn't?) and now has teamed up with Overture to
produce search results. If money is not an issue, being
included in Yahoo is still worthwhile, as many "Yahooligans"
will use nothing else for search. If you have a well-constructed
website that is content-rich, then most likely your site
will do well in the Yahoo search results.
Aside from search
directory pay-per-click programs, many of the major search
engines also have a PPI programs such as Lycos/FAST, AskJeeves/Teoma
and the Inktomi-based engines. For a yearly fee, your site
will included and then updated every 48 hours. This is helpful
when you are adjusting your keywords and trying to find
a cause and effect relationship between what adjustments
you make and how the search engines interact with those
adjustments.
Some of the
major search engines have now moved over to the Overture
Site Match program which is not only pay-per-inclusion but
has a pay-per-click component as well. Through paying a
few to one of several third party vendors your website will
first be indexed in 7 days into such places as AltaVista,
Yahoo Search, AllTheWeb, FAST network and many other engines.
After the initial inclusion, the website will then be re-indexed
every 48 hours into the sites mentioned above as well as
EntireWeb, Scrub The Web and Slider. In this business model,
you pay both a fee for inclusion and put money aside ($50
or more) for the pay-per-click component of this arrangement.
Pay-Per-Click
(PPC)
In the pay-per-click
model, you bid on keywords and the highest bidders get to
be at the top of the search engines. Every time someone
clicks on your website in the listings, you pay the fee
that you bid on. The upside to this model is that you most
probably will get targeted visitors to your website. The
downside is that customers may not buy, you still have to
pay, and your ROI may not make it worth staying with this
model.
Also, in the
past there has been great abuse of this system as people
were paid to click on the high-paying links and software
applications were developed for the same purposes. Making
a certain site's competitor pay for thousands of clicks
per day was not uncommon. Also some unscrupulous search
engines and directories engaged in this practice, misreporting
the clicks and reaping huge, but unethical profits. Today
the reporting systems are much more secure and abuse is
nowhere near the problem that it used to be.
There are a
couple of downsides to PPC programs. First, you will have
to spend some of your valuable time managing the keyword
bids. Second, once you stop bidding and paying, your site
will drop off the PPC search engine or directory's site
or sponsored/featured listings area of the site.
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