If you missed last month’s info sheet or would like copies of any I have prepared in the past, email david@smartype.com.au and I’ll send you a copy.

Last month I covered the major areas you need to address for your site to be successfully listed and how search engines place sites in their database. To finish up this month I will cover the emerging pay for listing model and what you should do about it.

Do I have to pay to get listed?
The answer to this depends on a multitude of (ever changing) factors. Most search engines still offer a free submission option for both general and business sites, however an increasing number (especially the larger or more specialised indexes) are experimenting with a pay for list model that offers faster listing or higher rankings than the free option. This is impossible to measure however.

It is difficult to justify paying for this service as your rankings are still affected by other factors - the spiders might pick your site up from another source anyway and there is usually still no guarantee that you’ll even be listed after paying!

So how do I get on the exclusive pay per listing sites like Yahoo?
The Open Directory Project (ODP), also known as DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org), produces a comprehensive directory of Web sites by relying on a team of thousands of volunteer editors. Over the past few years, the ODP has boomed in importance. Why? Because it provides directory results to Lycos, HotBot, Netscape, AOL Search, Google Directory, Alta Vista, Yahoo and more. Simply put, submitting to the ODP means that even if you can't get your pages directly indexed by these sites, you'll still have a presence in their engines.

Next month... Internet Copyright.