Search Engines play a vital role in website promotion. They are the first stop for most people trying to find information, services and products online. Therefore, it is necessary that your website surfaces quickly in search results.

There are number of search engines on the internet, some of which offer a service called “Paid Inclusion”.
Paid URL Inclusion is a search engine marketing technique where you need to pay a specific amount to search engine as an annual fee for your web page to be included in their index.

The question now is, why pay, when most search engines have automated programs called ’spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ that index all the pages on the web for free?
It is true that search engines will find your page and index them with no cost but WHEN? It could take at least couple of months for search engines to finally index the entire website. This is where paid URL inclusion beats Free Inclusion – Speed. It offers faster indexing of your web pages.

Search engines that provide paid URL inclusion services, use an additional spider that goes out and indexes specific pages that have been paid for. Free spiders will find a site, follow the links and index the pages, but it will take some time and you could lose out on valuable traffic but a paid spider will index the pages that have been paid for, almost immediately.

Advantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Quick Inclusion – after the payment is made, the website is indexed by the spider instantaneously.
Rapid re-indexing – the spider will return to the website very often, sometimes even daily!

Disadvantages of Paid URL Inclusion:
Cost – The biggest disadvantage is the charge. The annual cost for a ten page website ranges from $170 for Fast/Lycos to $600 for AltaVista.
Reach – Another disadvantage is the limited reach of paid URL inclusions. Popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and AOL do not offer paid inclusion. This implies that Paid URL inclusion will amount to only a small fraction of the daily traffic to the website.

In the end, the fact remains that search engines will still index websites whether they are paid inclusions or not. But if you want immediate indexing for your website on AltaVista, Lycos etc then you could opt for paid URL inclusion.

Tags: Indexing, Search Engine Marketing, SEO

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Search Engine News, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.