Speeding up a site`s entrance into search results

Retailers in growing numbers have been looking to paid search to help shoppers find their home and product pages online, at least in part because less-expensive page optimization can take a long time to produce results. Merchants who don’t pay for placement on search engines have complained that it can take months-– even years-–for a spider crawling the web to find and list their pages in search results, or for human directory editors to get around to reviewing and indexing their submissions.

But no more. Several search engines have added pay-for-review or pay-for-inclusion features that guarantee content will be reviewed and in some cases, automatically included in an engine’s listings within days. The most recent: Lycos, which added pay-for-inclusion in February. Lycos was following Inktomi, which provides search results for MSN and AOL and launched pay-for-inclusion last August; and LookSmart, which launched pay-for-review in July 2000. Yahoo has offered a pay-for-review option for the past few years.

“The good news is, you pay and within 48 hours you’re in,” notes Fredrick Marckini, CEO of search engine optimization services provider iProspect. But getting reviewed or indexed by the search engines is only half the battle. “It’s like buying a raffle ticket to a raffle that’s got 500 million chances," he says-–a lowball estimate of the average number of documents listed by a search engine.

To place higher up in search engines without paying for placement takes page optimization. Marckini says that page optimization can manipulate 100 or more variables to boost the likelihood that a merchant’s product or content page will show up higher in search results. “It`s everything from the template and layout of the page to the architecture that the site is hosted on and the way it serves pages, to the actual content of the page,” he says.

For example, search engines typically rank a page in part on keyword prominence, or how early in the text of the page a keyword appears. They also look for the concentration of a given keyword within the page. “If you say your site is about microwave ovens, but those words don’t appear until far down on the page, you’re not going to do well,” says Marckini.

While paid search is a key component, comprehensive online marketing campaigns shouldn’t stop there, he adds. Marckini notes that iProspect clients typically pay in the range of $15,000 to $25,000 per month for a variety of optimization services. By contrast, “Paid search can cost $2 to $4 per click on some of the more competitive keywords. We recently put 7 million visitors on a client’s web site – to do that with paid search would have cost about $1.4 million,” he says.