Case Study: Is Lycos InSite Pro Paid Inclusion Worth It? Last Update: Sunday, March 06, 2005. In this article I will show you the results of my test with the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion site submission program. I recently tested the Lycos InSite Pro paid inclusion system. InSite Pro offers guaranteed inclusion in the Lycos web index within 48 hours of submission, and full refresh of my web pages every 48 hours. Lycos InSite Pro offers two packages: * 1-250 Pages: $189.00/month * 251-500 Pages: $279.00/month I opted for the $279/month plan. I have about 500 pages of content across my network of sites and wanted all of them indexed in Lycos. The Results Lycos currently do not provide keyword, impression or click-through stats, although they do intend to offer them in the near future. So I checked my traffic stats according to my WebTrendsLive reports. I was shocked to find that Lycos only sent 41 visitors in the first 2 weeks of indexing my site. During the same period, Google sent me thousands of visitors. So I wrote to Lycos and asked if they could provide access to click through stats for my account. I wanted to double check, just in case my stats were wrong. They couldn't. So I also asked what I could change in my pages to get more traffic. Here's their helpful reply: Every entry in the Lycos index is created by automated software called a "spider." When a Web page is submitted to Lycos, the spider examines the full text of the page and determines relevant keywords based on its composition. The spider will pay close attention to the components of the URL, the TITLE tag, headings and subheadings, frequency of word use, location of words on the Web page, and the distance between words. If your Web page contains frames, our spider will be able to index the text in the <NOFRAMES> section only. We cannot examine the pages within your frame. Once our software has extracted this information, an abstract is created and stored in the Lycos index. Our search software ranks the search results by considering a combination of the factors listed above. Web pages with fewer than 100 words of text are less likely to be found in a Lycos search. Read that again in case you missed anything. Note that the Lycos spider pays close attention to the URL. So if you ever wondered if search engines took into account keywords in URLs, you now know the truth. Another important point is that your pages should contain 100 words or more, otherwise it's unlikely to be found in Lycos. For some unknown reason Lycos doesn't like my web pages. There's nothing new in their reply that suggests I have not optimized my web pages in the correct manner to achieve top rankings in Lycos. Thankfully, Google does like my pages, so I don't intend to change my pages just to cater to the Lycos ranking algorithm. 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Buy and Sell your text link ad space for FREE. Why pay a company a percentage of your income every month when you can sell it here for FREE? Text link marketing is here to stay and we are proud to offer this service for no charge to you. What is the catch? Read on... You’ve Created a Business Website: So Now What? By Erin Ferree Platinum Quality Author Article Word Count: 1238 [View Summary] Comments (0)  Congratulations! You and your designer have just finished creating your business website. It’s live on the Internet, waiting for all of those hot prospects to visit and hire you. But, you hate just sitting around, waiting for things to happen. You feel like you should be working on convincing potential clients to visit your site, but you’re not sure what to do. We’ve developed a the following 5 strategies to get the word out about your website in a big way: 1. Submit your site to the major search engines. If you tell them about you, they will come! Yahoo, Google and MSN are the most- used search engines, and submitting your site to these search engines is easy. You can even do a free, basic-level submission in many cases. Visit the following pages to submit your site: • Yahoo: Visit http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html • Google: Follow the instructions at http://dmoz.org/add.html to suggest your site • MSN: Visit http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2 2. Exchange or establish links with other sites. Establishing a larger presence in the online community is the next step toward growing your brand online. Submit your website to professional organizations to which you belong, directories of the area where your business is located, business directories, and other sites, as appropriate. Links from outside sites to your own site are one of the elements that search engines look at when ranking your site. The general rule of thumb is that if high- quality, well ranked sites link to you, your site will be better ranked in return. If you have control over the text that is highlighted in your link, keep in mind that the search engines give extra weight to this text when ranking your site. So, embedding your keyword phrases into this part of the link would be to your advantage. Read more about this in our article about Search Engine Optimization. And, no discussion of linking would be complete without a final note on avoiding “link farms,” which are sites that just include large directories of links. Link farms are viewed as spam sites by the search engines. Potential clients will be more likely to click through to your site from high-quality, individual sites and legitimate directories than from a link farm. 3. Write articles about your area of expertise and post them to your website. Content is king when it comes to websites. It’s been shown that more people will repeatedly visit your website if you have fresh content available. Adding an “Articles” section to your website and writing an article every month or every other month is a great way to entice visitors to return regularly. It’s also a great way to naturally raise the keyword phrase count on your site, which can improve your Search Engine ranking. – if you write articles about your area of expertise, you’re bound to naturally use keywords and keyword phrases that would be a good match for your services. If you can’t think of topics for your articles, a good way to start is to address some of your clients’ most frequently asked questions. Create a list of those questions that your clients and potential clients always ask, and create articles that answer those questions. The added bonus in this is that you’ll have ready-made answers to those questions, and you can just point clients to the article when those questions arise in the future. One important aspect of the article-publishing strategy is to create a compelling, keyword-filled “About the Author” section to include with all of your article publications. I suggest that you vary the text of this section from article to article, to make it relate to the article’s content. I also recommend that you create “About the Author” sections of varying lengths – when you submit your articles to other websites (see strategy 4), you may be able to submit longer “About the Author” sections to some websites or publications. Be sure to include a link back to your website in this section as well. Finally, be sure to have your articles proofread! Ensuring that your articles are grammatically correct is an incredibly important step towards extending a professional brand image online. 4. Submit your articles to other websites for additional promotion. There are many sites online that specialize in listing directories of articles. If you include a link back to your website in your author’s bio, publishing your articles on these sites is a great way to establish some links back to your website. And, other sites and eZines for publication may even publish your article! Many article directories will allow free listings under a basic membership, but you may consider upgrading your membership once you have published several articles. We recommend that you submit your articles to the following sites: • http://www.ideamarketers.com • http://www.ezinearticles.com • http://www.goarticles.com/ • http://www.topica.com/ • http://www.impactarticles.com • http://www.amazines.com • http://www.articlecity.com/ If you don’t have time to submit your articles to other websites, there are a few options to consider. To automatically submit to many article directories, you can use an Article Distribution Service, such as the one available at http:// www.virtualizeyourbiz.com. At $25 per article, it’s quite affordable. The other option is to hire a helper or virtual assistant to do the submissions for you. Either way, submitting your article to several article directories will help to get the word out about your website. 5. Create an email newsletter. Sending an email newsletter (or eZine) out to your database once a month or every other month is the best way to keep in touch with your potential clients and to keep your business brand at the top of their minds. It’s best to send out is a newsletter that gives away a bit of free consulting – some information about your area of expertise. This will earn you more respect than sending out a “fluffy” newsletter that is primarily trying to sell your prospects something. If you include information that your subscribers can implement by themselves, your subscribers will hold you in even higher regard. A newsletter also is a great way to gather prospects’ names and grow a loyal “fan” base. Put a newsletter subscription box on your website. It’s great to add the subscription box to every page if possible! Also include a note about your eZine in your email signature file, and in the “About the Author” section with all of the articles you send out when using Strategy 4. Many entrepreneurs insist that they don’t have the time to write a newsletter. But, if you’re already writing the articles we recommend in Strategy 3, then most of the work is done for you. Your newsletter is another great place for you to publish your articles – with an article, and a bit of extra sidebar information and promotional copy, you’ve got yourself a complete newsletter. These five steps will expand your business’s reach exponentially. Consistently use them over a period of time, and they will increase your credibility, leads and sales generated online. About the Author Erin Ferree, Founder and Lead Designer of elf design, is a brand identity and graphic design expert. She has been helping small businesses grow with bold, clean and effective logo and marketing material designs for over a decade. elf design offers the comprehensive graphic and web design services of a large agency, with the one- on-one, personalized attention of an independent design specialist. Erin works closely in partnership with her clients to create designs that are visible, credible and memorable – and that tell their unique business stories in a clear and consistent way. For more information about elf design, please visit: Logo design at http://www.elf-design.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/
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