Should You Invest $39 for More Traffic?

I don’t usually recommend my clients spend any money on
search engine placement, but I may be about to change my
mind.

For just $39 you can get listed in the third most popular
search engine within 72 hours.

So why choose this option above competing payment plans from
Yahoo, Overture and others? To answer that we have to have a
little background information.

Determine Your Strongest Keywords

One of the keys to high placement in search engine listings
is the proper use of keywords within the text of the page as
well as the code. Keywords are phrases typed into search
engines when someone is searching for a list of businesses
in your category.

Choosing the strongest keyword phrase for a give page is
therefore a critical part of optimizing your site for the
search engines.

The tool I use most often to help a client choose strong
keywords is WordTracker
(http://www.zmoon.com/cgi-bin/pl.pl?word).

WordTracker tracks how often a keyword was typed into all
the search engines for the last 60 days. After it helps you
expand your keyword list it can show you how often any word
or phrase was searched on in the last 2 months.

Now you might guess that a keyword searched on 5,000 times
in the recent past would be a better choice than one that
was only searched on 150 times. However, the critical factor
is how many competing web sites have that phrase in use as
well.

So if the phrase that is searched on 5,000 times has 100,000
web sites that match, it might not be as good as the lower
one if it has only 25 competing sites.

Why KEI is Important to You

WordTracker uses a formula to calculate the Keyword
Effectiveness Index (KEI) for your keywords. It’s based on
the relationship between the number of times a phrase is
searched on and how many competing sites contain the same
phrase. You want to find keyword phrases that get a lot of
searches, but have relatively few competing sites.

Keywords that have a KEI of less than 10 are so competitive
it’s very tough to get a high ranking. Keywords that rate a
score from 11-100 are promising phrases for your site. If
you can create a keyword phrase that scores between 100 and
400, but sure to use it! WordTracker says any keyword with a
KEI above 400 is “a gift.”

The Surprising Search Engine

When you look at the KEIs produced by the different search
engines, something really pops out. Given the same keyword
phrase, the KEIs in MSN Search are often much higher than in
Google and Yahoo.

Here’s an example from a recent client. In Google, the
phrase “life coach” rated a KEI of 3.175, hardly worth
considering. Google has 58,500 sites with that phrase in its
data base.

On the other hand, MSN Search only lists 29 sites with “life
coach” on their pages. That’s why the KEI is 6,405.552. So
for this phrase, you definitely want to be in MSN Search
because there’s virtually no competition.

MSN Search only gets 12% of the search engine traffic
compared to Yahoo’s 33% and Google’s 35%. However, that 12%
represents 39 million searches a day, not too shabby in my
book.

Pay to Play

You can try the free submission to MSN Search
(http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm) , but they
don’t sound too encouraging about your chances of getting
listed within 60 days if at all. You can also pay Inktomi
(http://www.inktomi.com/products/web_search/submit.html#subscribe)
a yearly charge of $39 for your first page and $25 for
subsequent pages and get listed in MSN Search and several
others within 72 hours .

Yahoo charges $299 a year to be considered for admission,
and Pay per Click services like Overture can churn through a
lot of money in a hurry. Thirty-nine bucks sounds like a
deal if you’re cautiously dipping a toe into this area of
search engine marketing.

Tune Up Your Pages

Of course getting listed in the search engines is only the
start. If you’re not on the first two pages of a search, you
don’t exist. So make sure that each page you submit is
optimized for a specific keyword phrase.

If your site features a lot of content for your visitors,
just give each topic its own page and keywords and you’ll
have multiple ways for people to get into your web site.

Conclusion

For just $39 you can get at least one page of your site into
an arena with minimal competition. This is the least
expensive search engine payment option and seems to hold the
possibility of a high ranking for your site. For more
suggestions on optimizing your pages, see my article
(http://www.zmoon.com/articles/home_page.shtml). Good luck!