What is Pay For Inclusion Services In SEO?
Search Engine Marketing is composed of two very different elements. Search engine optimization (SEO), strictly speaking, is about improving your natural search engine rankings through tweaking your web site. Pay-per-click (PPC) programs on the other hand are based on the ability to pay for placement. Even Google has separated the two on its search results, with natural search results appearing on the left side, and paid search results appearing on the right.
When you’re fighting today’s competition to improve your web-site ranking, you need to use every tool in your arsenal. One of those tools is paid inclusion. But there’s a lot of confusion around paid inclusion and when it should be used. Very often, paid inclusion is confused with paid placement. They’re very different strategies.
When you hear about paid inclusion, you may well hear it called Pay for Inclusion (PFI) or Pay per Inclusion (PPI). Even when you’re looking at those two terms, you’re looking at differences in meaning. Pay for Inclusion is a strategy whereby you pay a fee simply to be included in a search index. This fee doesn’t guarantee your rank in the index. It’s a simple flat fee that’s usually paid annually.
Pay per Inclusion is also a strategy in which you pay a fee to be included in a search index, but the fee that you pay in PPI is based on the number of clicks you receive as a result of that inclusion. Like PFI, PPI still doesn’t guarantee your rank in the search engine. Your only guarantee is that you will be included. And that per-click fee can often be comparatively high, in the range of $.30 per click.
The service that guarantees your rank in a search index is paid placement, which is also called Pay for Placement (PFP). When you pay for placement, you are
guaranteed that your site will not only be listed, but that it will place in a specific rank consistently as long as you’re willing to pay the fee for that rank.
There are some other “pay-for” strategies that you might consider. Paid directory review (PDR) serv- ices will guarantee that a review for a directory will take place in a guaranteed length of time (usu- ally much faster than it would otherwise), but again, this is no guarantee of inclusion or placement. XML inclusion is another story. This is a strategy to ensure that the dynamic content on your site is included in search results. Because some sites have constantly changing content, XML inclusion may be a requirement for them.
The different types of inclusion and what your payments will buy you can be confusing. Table 15-1 recaps some of the differences among the types of inclusion.
NOTE
Over time, Yahoo! has gobbled up a number of other search properties, so you may still see their names, but those properties – including Inktomi, AlltheWeb, AltaVista, and FastSearch – actually all come back to Yahoo!. When you’re weighing factors for the search engines to select, keep in mind that all of these actually are just one.
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