Paid Inclusion

Paid inclusion is a little known but important component of search engine marketing.  Essentially this is when a webmaster or web site owner pays a search engine to have their web site indexed.  This can be very useful to getting a web site quickly indexed and included in a search engine.  Paid inclusion also sometimes refers to buying listings and links in directories, which do not crawl a web site but theoretically send website traffic from their directory.  With a popular directory like Yahoo or Business.com, this can also increase your link popularity substantially.

Unlike PPC advertising though, paid inclusion does not guarantee a visible search engine position in the search results.  However, depending on the competitiveness of the keywords being used, it is likely that it will deliver a much higher ranking in the search engine results.  So although the results are not guaranteed, it is worth doing.

Paid inclusion is sometimes grouped together with paid submission.  This is where a website owner pays to have their websiteincluded in a directory typically.  The price for this ranges from $10 to as much as $299 for Yahoo.  The difference in price is due to the popularity of the website, and the amount of traffic it can direct your way. On the other hand, paying less money for a submission to a very relevant directory to be listed, can sometimes be more useful and worthwhile.