Should you have a Search Engine Budget?

In short, yes. We recommend that any site owner establish a search engine submission budget. This is especially true if you are running a commercial web site. Sites for non-profit organizations also benefit tremendously from a web search engine promotional budget. Okay, so how much?

The Minimum: Yahoo

How much to budget? At minimum, you might consider submission to Yahoo for one year. This is because the flat $300 annual fee that Yahoo charges to be in its human-compiled directory may help ensure that Google picks up your site quickly in Google's crawler-based results.

What does Yahoo have to do with Google?

Google crawls the web and adds pages for free. To decide which pages it should pick up (and potentially rank well), it analyzes links from across the web). Being listed in Yahoo's human-compiled directory is potentially one of the best links you can gain, to influence Google.

It may also be that Google will find your page (and perhaps rank it well) even without the benefit of a Yahoo link. So, if money is tight, wait two or three months after you launch your site and see how you do. If you are doing poorly at Google, then spending the money with Yahoo may help you.

Need To Be Listed Fast?

Often, those who launch new web sites want to appear in search engines right away. In these cases, you'll need to budget more money. By paying an "inclusion" fee to some of the crawler-based search engines, you can shorten the usual delay appearing to only a few days. The one-time fees are shown below, by the major crawlers that offer such programs:

Crawler Budget
Inktomi $40
AltaVista $40
FAST (via Lycos) $30
Ask Jeeves/Teoma $30
Total $140

These are called one-time fees, but as later discussed, you'll see that they are charged on a six-month or yearly basis. Don't worry about that. For the bare minimum submission effort that this section discusses, calling them one-time fees is correct, as you shall see.

Paid Listings Are Also Fast

Another key option to getting listed faster is to consider using paid listing programs. The budget below will get you going for at least a month, in most cases. For LookSmart, it will cover you for a year.

Paid Listings Budget
LookSmart $230
Overture (GoTo) $50
Google $25
FindWhat $25
Total $330

Let's put it all together. Here's the ideal amount you would budget, if you want to show up in the widest range of important search engines within a matter of days:

Search Engine Submission Budget
Yahoo $300
Crawlers $140
Paid Listings $330
Total $770

You can get listed without spending a penny. However, if your goal is to be seen right away in as many places as possible, you'll set aside the amount shown above, in a combined budget.

Contact us to learn more about how KeyResults Internet Services might benefit your business.

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