Re: On paying for SE placement-- spinoff of the meta tag conversation

Yahoo isn't even in the top of the search engines.  It's considered a
"directory" rather than a search engine and it's nice to get in, but no
matter how high one places in the search engines, that still doesn't
guarantee that people will buy what you are selling.

I came up with a program that I tested on a client's site.  This particular
client was getting about 14 hits per day from web ring referrals and
traditional searches.  She was already in Yahoo; I had no problem getting
her site accepted.  I have a distant cousin who used to work for Yahoo that
explained to me why many sites are rejected and what makes many accepted.
Her advice worked for me.

This particular client paid me less than $500 for a five page site and
wondered why she wasn't getting any business.  This is a person who had
never sold the product that she tried to sell online; she had no experience
at what she was selling off line, either.  To make things more difficult,
her service required extraordinary circumstances for someone to want to
search for her service anyway as it was a death related service.  My client
has health problems that made the situation more difficult, too, since she
had little experience with email and couldn't remember from one day to the
next even to look at the written instructions that I sent her on how to
forward or reply to emails.  Since she had nothing to lose, I tried a
program for her based on my cumulative research over the past five years.
It was basically a crap shoot; I'm working on another site now where I can
do the same thing under controlled circumstances to see whether this can be
salable to the public.  Anyway, I woke up one morning to check my email and
found that she had 200 requests during the night.  By the end of a 24-hour
period; she'd had 1200 hits with email requests.  That pattern continued for
several days and could have continued.  My client decided this wasn't the
business for her, though, since so many of the requests that came through
were from people with tragic circumstances.

My point is that there are many ways of marketing on the internet.  To fight
the crowd, you have to think non-traditionally but with the traditional
methods available.  The other site I'm testing increased it's sales 400% the
first week we tried the new program and had 8 times that amount the second
week.   Once I work out the glitches, I'll feel like I can recommend it
without hesitation.  It takes a LOT of work to make this fly but much of it
can be done by the site owner rather than the webmaster.  I'm sure the
workload will diminish as I learn how to do it more efficiently.  The
internet is still a relatively new area of marketing products and services
compared to traditional means of income.  Don't get discouraged!  If a site
as ugly as the one I made for this client (my goal is to please the
customer, not me) who can't even manage to reply to a customer's email can
get on Yahoo and increase it's hits 1000 % in one day through clever
marketing, think what a _good_ site can do!

Wendy Miller
Web Designer

----- Original Message -----
From: Missy Scott <MBScott(at)d-assistance.com>

> Hi all..
>
> I noticed the last time I went to resubmit the sites I did over the summer
> that on yahoo and one other search engine (could've been excite.... can't
> remember), there were new options to pay $199 for "fast submission."  Has
> anyone tried this yet, or had a client who did?
>
> It's frustrating for me as a web designer to want to offer promotion as
part
> of the "package."  I explain, over and over, that it takes months to be
> listed on search engines, usually.  I get clients to help me build their
> meta tags and descriptions, explain why they must have some good,
> descriptive text near the top of the page, I submit and submit and submit,
I
> use comments, everything I can think of to improve their search engine
> rankings.  STILL, it takes months.  It has happened to me that one of my
> clients was targeted by a company who promises high rankings fast, and
> though he didn't really fall for it, it does disturb him that his site
isn't
> in search engines yet.  This particular company was charging $2000!!!  I
> didn't charge that much to build the whole thing.
>
> Anyone who has tried the "pay for listing" search engine option, I wish
> you'd let me know how it worked out.  Honestly, I think it would be less
> expensive for me to charge my clients a flat $199 to do this rather than
> them paying for my time to do it free.  With a listing in yahoo after four
> days, which is the promise, I could concentrate on the others for free.
Any
> thoughts on this?
>
> Missy Scott
> missy01(at)nycap.rr.com
>

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