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Web Site Myth on Paid Promotion

Many believe that the only way to get web traffic and good hits on the Internet is to pay a service to promote their web site. With Yahoo charging a $300 annual review fee for commercial listings in their directory, and many search engines charging a fee to be included in their index, webmasters with limited budgets often find themselves despairing of ever getting listed, let alone ranking well in the major engines.

Although there are certainly plenty of opportunities to speed up listings by paying for a review or inclusion, good old fashioned search engine optimization (SEO) and an extra dose of patience can get you there as well.

Most search engines have some type of "add url" feature. Ignore it. Search engines find and add sites to their index by following links on other web sites. Although submitting your URL may make you feel better, it's unlikely to result in a great listing. Instead, spend your time finding relevant sites that might wish to link to yours. Ask these sites for a link, and where appropriate, link to them in return. As the number of incoming links to your site begins to grow, the spiders will naturally find their way to your site to index it. Since most search engines now include link popularity as part of their ranking algorithm, allowing the spiders to find you this way will often result in a higher ranking.

Although Yahoo! does require a yearly fee for reviewing commercial sites, many other directories accept submissions for free. The Open Directory Project, GoGuides and JoeAnt are just three examples of free directories that are spidered by most search engines. Apart from the traffic that a listing in these directories can provide, they also count toward link popularity by the search engines that spider them.